Western Standard - Mountain Standard Time - May 12, 2021

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00:03:00.000 good morning and welcome to mountain standard time i'm your host nathan gita and today we'll

00:03:26.040 be speaking with John C. Thompson, a founding member of Civitas, about conservatism in Canada

00:03:31.400 in the past as well as the present, where it might go into the future. Stay tuned for that. He'll be

00:03:36.320 on at 9.30 a.m. Pacific, 10.30 a.m. Mountain. Remember to like and subscribe to us on Facebook

00:03:43.580 and YouTube to be notified when we go live. And also, please don't forget to take out a subscription

00:03:50.520 on the Western Standard. That's how you can support us. We aren't the CBC. We don't get a

00:03:55.100 big check from the Liberals every year, and we need as much support as we can get to continue

00:03:59.300 funding the independent journalism and the truly investigative reporting that we do into these

00:04:03.780 questions throughout all of Western Canada to make Western Canada a better place. We've had some bad

00:04:10.880 news for us in northern BC. According to reports out of Victoria, the BC NDP government intends

00:04:16.220 to rearrange the ridings of our province and increase the share of seats that belong to the

00:04:21.240 Lower Mainland. It is said that this is due to the shift in population as Vancouver and the Fraser

00:04:27.080 Valley continue to grow, but it also has serious political implications. I understand that

00:04:34.220 representation by population is a core element of democratic government. At the same time,

00:04:39.880 we need to be honest about the fact that throughout Canada, let alone BC, most of the

00:04:44.300 population live far away from the natural resources that heat their homes, electrify their Netflix

00:04:49.720 binges and feed their families as well as their vehicles we live in an interconnected society

00:04:56.360 when it comes to logistics but as political polarization grows differences between people

00:05:01.400 grow particularly based on where they live the problem becomes those who do the hard work of

00:05:06.920 feeding clothing powering and heating all of society have less of a less of a voice in policy

00:05:12.840 making due to representation by population given the importance of these rural areas that does not

00:05:19.320 seem a just arrangement to me it doesn't seem just at all it might be perfectly fair you know it's

00:05:24.280 perfectly fair to break a cookie in half but if one you know be giving a large cookie to two people

00:05:29.720 of very different sizes and nutritional needs uh it's not just it's only fair furthermore the

00:05:35.720 political divide in bc is largely geographical large urban centers tend to be more left-wing

00:05:40.200 the rural ridings are more right-wing this is true anywhere else in the world if it becomes a

00:05:44.920 structural reality that no one on the right will ever take government again or that ideas from the

00:05:49.720 right can be ignored by those in charge without risk of repercussions our government will inevitably

00:05:56.200 slide into ignorant policy and we can see this in the one-party states of the united states for

00:06:01.800 example and other one-party countries places where effectively one government is in control

00:06:06.920 all the time one particular political party particular political perspective and and they

00:06:12.600 become unbalanced you need your right leg and you need your left leg you need your right wing you

00:06:16.840 need your left wing hopefully the opposition party the bc liberals are able to make a goal line stand

00:06:24.040 and keep our rural ridings from becoming unimportant actors in governmental affairs or perhaps it is

00:06:29.560 time to revisit the idea of a regional senate where equal weight is given to every part of

00:06:34.120 british columbia to ensure that bigger centers cannot run roughshod over the rights privileges

00:06:39.080 and culture of little ones in the end rural british colombians will need to organize themselves

00:06:43.960 to defend what little representation we currently have from being eroded the people who provide all

00:06:48.920 the means for urbanites to live easier lives should not be systematically shut out of decision

00:06:54.920 making for the whole province if such a trend continues forget about western sovereignty a new

00:06:59.640 province likely called new caledonia if we can appropriate that name for those little islands

00:07:03.640 in the South Pacific, will suddenly emerge in confederation.

00:07:07.460 And so it's this interesting point, I think, that needs to be drawn here,

00:07:11.480 is that British Columbia, again, I've been trying to communicate this

00:07:13.820 as best as I can to our brothers and sisters in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba.

00:07:17.840 Apparently, a lot of our readership actually does come from Ontario.

00:07:20.560 I'm guessing from everything, you know, north of Toronto,

00:07:23.800 north and west of Toronto, out towards Muskoka, Perry,

00:07:27.480 and then up into Sault Ste. Marie, and then finally Lakehead, Tundur Bay.

00:07:30.440 But the point is that for all of us Western Canadians, wherever you might define yourself as that, or at least Canadians who are tired of the Laurentian consensus, the fact of the matter is that just as Canada has these issues, right, where there's major population sinks in certain parts of the country, we have that here in BC too.

00:07:48.700 In fact, BC, maybe one of the reasons BC is so attractive to Ontarians, I'm guessing there's a larger portion of ex-Ontarians in British Columbia than there is in either of the other three Western provinces out of the four of us.

00:08:02.120 The reason I think for that is that it's actually basically built the same way as Ontario in the fact that we have one very large population sink in the lower mainland, just like just like there's Toronto and and of course, southwestern Ontario, southern Ontario in in that province.

00:08:19.220 and then the rest of it is just rural and and there isn't there isn't another large population

00:08:25.240 sink anywhere let's be clear it's better balanced than man manitoba i i've i've been to the rural

00:08:31.380 parts of manitoba i've been to the edge of manitoba uh i was blown away by the fact that

00:08:36.120 when i drove into thompson for example about almost a year ago exactly just just shy a week

00:08:41.000 or so i i drove in and i was expecting basically a prince george right i was i was expecting a

00:08:48.020 prince george now prince george supposedly is 80 000 people that's the the number on the sign it

00:08:53.400 hasn't changed we keep building these apartment blocks everywhere housing prices are ridiculous

00:08:57.880 and it's hard to get rental space up here trust me i'm looking um but but for some reason the

00:09:03.560 number on the sign still says 80 000 let's just round up to 100 to make it nice easy numbers to

00:09:08.340 play with thompson is 10 supposedly give or take who knows what the surrounding area does for it

00:09:14.640 maybe a crest 20 with the surrounding area and every, you know, every single person and some of

00:09:20.120 their pets counted. But there I am driving into Thompson, Manitoba, thinking to myself, well,

00:09:24.940 this is going to be the northern capital of Manitoba. This is where this is where everything

00:09:28.940 that isn't connected by a road basically has to come back to. And there's a rail line. And this

00:09:33.940 is where the airport is to shuck stuff out to the rest of northern Manitoba. That's where that's

00:09:39.060 where i am well no no i'm not in a prince george size city i'm in a 10 000 size city it is much

00:09:46.980 much more it's literally almost 10 times less than prince george i was blown away and and so i guess

00:09:52.420 in manitoba they have that sort of imbalance too because they're basically winnipeg and then the

00:09:56.820 rest of manitoba but but in bc it's more intense because even winnipeg's not that big of a town

00:10:02.140 it isn't it's not nearly the size of vancouver whereas with vancouver the fraser valley and then

00:10:06.840 of course the south island with victoria it's huge it's huge it's millions and millions of people

00:10:12.380 and then literally three probably somewhere between half and three quarters of the province

00:10:16.220 depending on where you're counting from lives in that hundred mile radius right next to the u.s

00:10:19.780 border just like in ontario and then you go into the rest of bc and of course there's nothing well

00:10:26.200 nothing there we're here but but it's far sparser the population is far sparser far further in

00:10:33.040 between and far fewer. And so I think that like Ontario, there's a struggle in BC where there

00:10:40.440 isn't even a Calgary and an Edmonton, and there isn't even a Regina and a Saskatoon, right? There

00:10:46.920 isn't even, you know, there isn't even like a Red Deer or a Renfrew or, you know, there's a few

00:10:52.120 other places throughout the prairies where like there's some other population that kind of draws

00:10:56.460 some political power with it and helps that rural area get rolling and and in bc it's it's hard it's

00:11:03.500 really hard and i've been explaining this to to everybody since i started the show that bc is very

00:11:08.140 divided it's a very divided place we have all these little river valleys we're not like the prairies

00:11:12.700 we don't have just two big rivers just cruising along and then some big lakes at the end of them

00:11:17.900 that that just cruise along and everybody kind of gets a piece and everybody could like you know be

00:11:21.900 on it could be could be connected through you know back to the fur trade and importage and

00:11:27.120 even highway 16 and and highway one or so the two the two junctures for the rail line like even

00:11:33.160 there like bc it's it's just it's just so divided geographically speaking there's mountains in the

00:11:40.480 way man there's mountains and valleys and rivers and and all sorts of stuff in the way including

00:11:46.080 of course a coastline that's full of islands and then a very large island called vancouver island

00:11:50.640 which is not connected even today by any kind of land form of travel, unlike PEI.

00:11:57.860 So it's just kind of nonsense.

00:12:00.440 It's kind of nonsense. 0.72

00:12:01.640 It's a lot.

00:12:03.220 It's a lot.

00:12:04.580 And so if BC actually goes down this road of taking out all these rural ridings in northern BC

00:12:13.260 or lifting their protections and reappropriating them into southern BC,

00:12:18.260 including increasing the seat count in general so then so southern bc is already going up and

00:12:22.860 they're actually taking from the northern part there is going to be some consternation to use

00:12:28.140 uh to use a large word but something we kind of hear uh from from westerns when we're watching

00:12:33.340 those there's going to be some people are very very upset uh to put it politely it's it doesn't

00:12:40.820 i i can't imagine actually what kind of boiling over of emotion that would cause

00:12:46.240 it we in northern bc already don't feel like the south listens to us right we already don't think

00:12:52.100 that people in vancouver really listen to us or hear us or want to help us you know um we kind of

00:12:58.020 rely on the suburban ridings of vancouver the same way again at a federal level the tories kind of

00:13:02.620 rely on those suburban ridings in toronto um they we rely on them to basically swing the vote so

00:13:09.740 that we get a right-wing government in british columbia and let's be clear the right-wing party

00:13:13.740 and british columbia is literally called the bc liberals which are like man there are a lot of

00:13:19.760 parallels between bc and ontario i'm just seeing it now maybe that's why i call ontario un terrible

00:13:23.760 all the time is that we just we know that we're actually too similar this is sad i i don't like

00:13:29.200 this realization we're going to get into that another time the point is that not unlike the

00:13:34.820 ontario kind of liberal situation before they went full woke and left-wing and insane the bc

00:13:40.740 liberal party is a kind of free market right of center party uh mostly centrist kind of ideas

00:13:47.180 whereas well it's supposed to be it's supposed to be it was founded that way my producer is

00:13:52.380 grimacing at me it's that's how it was supposed to be and i am not defending the bc liberal party

00:13:58.860 per se i want to be very clear about that but the point is the point is that they they between the

00:14:06.340 suburban ridings of Abbotsford and

00:14:08.560 Chilliwack and even Langley and that sort of

00:14:10.640 thing, all the suburbs of, not

00:14:12.520 suburbs of Vancouver, they are not, they are actually

00:14:14.540 their own townships proper, but

00:14:16.440 nonetheless, places on the

00:14:18.660 outskirts of the GVRD, right, the Greater

00:14:20.380 Vancouver Regional District, and

00:14:22.240 their own municipalities, basically in the

00:14:24.420 Fraser Valley, which also had population sinks 0.92

00:14:26.480 but happened to be, we call it the Bible Belt

00:14:28.400 for a reason, so they happened to be more right-wing than

00:14:30.400 left-wing, that combined with

00:14:32.460 the rest of the interior is how you

00:14:34.420 one government in BC as a right wing party. Okay, that's how it works. Can't describe it for you in

00:14:39.700 Alberta, can't describe it for you in the rest of the West. I don't know how it works there.

00:14:43.720 But I mean, at a federal level, just like how you need the suburbs in Toronto, at a provincial level

00:14:47.780 in BC, you need the suburbs of Vancouver. Well, they lost the suburbs of Vancouver this last

00:14:53.640 election. That's fine. People are allowed to vote however they want. And let's be clear,

00:14:57.520 the Liberals ran a terrible campaign and their leader wasn't very inspiring. And it was all

00:15:02.000 nonsense. So that's fine. They got punished at the polls as they rightly deserved. That's fine.

00:15:07.560 I accept that. The issue is that now that the NDP are in charge, they're not being good sports

00:15:12.980 about this. If they actually put this forward and they actually reappropriate the seat,

00:15:16.620 they're effectively giving themselves a majority. Not unlike, again, if we want to use other

00:15:21.280 analogies, the idea of the Democrats in the United States, they have been talking about making

00:15:26.500 various territories into states. And I'm totally fine with the idea that certain places should go

00:15:32.500 on to statehood. I don't think D.C. should be a state. That makes no sense. But Puerto Rico

00:15:37.420 probably should become a state. Guam and the other sovereign U.S. territories that are inside of

00:15:43.540 their milieu should probably start moving their way towards statehood. The point is, though,

00:15:48.340 that, of course, the Democrats want to do all these things in order to stack those electoral

00:15:52.720 votes to increase the blue state advantage to the point where they just have a perpetual majority

00:15:57.880 of of blue state votes right so the problem is that that they're just stacking the deck for

00:16:05.840 themselves now all people in power do this right wing and left wing they do this and people could

00:16:09.980 argue that the last time that the electoral boundaries are being redrawn i think that's

00:16:13.660 actually referenced over here if we look at uh one of the uh one of the things we're bringing

00:16:19.440 up here yep so there's so this is into victoria news uh we'll screen share this in in a moment

00:16:25.520 uh we uh you know all reference all deference to victoria news for uh for for putting this up here

00:16:32.560 but um we so we have the bc ruin herbal political divide uh could be getting wider in years to come

00:16:39.600 but the thing that we wanted to we want to highlight here is that uh there was a protection

00:16:46.880 put in place in 2014 that prevents uh reducing the number of uh of seats and there was also uh of

00:16:54.240 course of course um there there was there was protections put in place in order to ensure that

00:17:02.560 various various seats wouldn't be eliminated just because their population wasn't up to snuff or

00:17:07.600 their population wasn't the same as a lower mainland so electoral boundary reviews take

00:17:11.200 place every six years led by a bc supreme court judge former premier gordon cal initiated the

00:17:15.280 protection of rural seats after 2008 review were making eliminating one seat in the caribou thompson

00:17:19.760 region and one in the north so and then just referencing a certain mr rustad who's right

00:17:24.960 next door to us here uh he's the mla for van for vanderhoof just making the point that uh

00:17:31.600 it would reduce it from you know as six seats from its current 10 seats which is kind of dangerous

00:17:37.200 that we have uh the north could have as few as six seats from its current 10. and that's and that's

00:17:42.240 dangerous it's dangerous and people can talk about over representation all they want but the fact of

00:17:46.800 the matter the fact of the matter is that who does the work that keeps everybody else warm and safe

00:17:55.120 and fed who does it well it's not the urbanites i'm sorry like i'm not trying to throw our urbanite

00:18:01.760 brothers under the bus here and the fact of the matter is that this is of course the western you

00:18:06.320 know standard we're here for all western canadians i'm not here to just create division the point

00:18:11.280 that i would draw though is that uh is that we need to understand northern bc deserves representation

00:18:20.880 and unless unless we are going to change things right unless we are going to create for example

00:18:28.800 a second cameral of government right a second tier of government a second house of government

00:18:33.680 which is to say basically a provincial senate i i actually don't know why there are no provincial

00:18:38.320 Senates. I mean, all the states have a second

00:18:40.420 House of Government. We probably

00:18:42.480 should, because if you look

00:18:44.440 at just how diverse and 1.00

00:18:46.420 crazy things are when it comes to

00:18:48.580 the different provinces in the West,

00:18:51.260 like, let's think about that.

00:18:53.100 Calgary kind of rules 0.56

00:18:54.600 the roost in Alberta. So does Edmonton.

00:18:56.800 You know, I'm sure there are parts of Alberta

00:18:58.460 that don't like Edmonton and Calgary

00:19:00.500 and sometimes Red Deer telling them what to do.

00:19:03.240 I think they would like to have their

00:19:04.560 own say in what's going on. If you

00:19:06.580 made a 12 person senate or a 30 person senate that was a second house of government and you divide

00:19:11.520 Alberta into 30 sections and same as Saskatchewan same as Manitoba same as BC if all those places

00:19:16.680 had second where we had an actual bicameral system of government right not unicameral right which is

00:19:21.620 just one I'll remember what a cam is on a car right turns the crank gets turned by the crank

00:19:26.780 to let in the air for the timing bell to allow for the engine to fire bicameral system is that

00:19:31.520 both of them have to turn in order for something to happen that's what we believe in in parliamentary

00:19:37.060 democracy at the federal level and it's a wonder to me that we don't have it at all of our little

00:19:41.520 our little parliaments at the legislature level i don't understand why that why that was eliminated

00:19:46.260 it gives a huge amount of authority to the premier's office huge amount of authority

00:19:50.100 it makes the legislature less effective and then the bureaucracy is completely i mean not i don't

00:19:55.420 know if they're all out of control all the time but the bureaucracy runs runs the show so without

00:19:59.660 a second house of government where there's kind of consultation and a sober second thought about

00:20:04.780 things and going you know what we as as the regional representative of all of you know the

00:20:10.060 kootenays which is the same as all of vancouver island the same as the lower mainland whatever

00:20:14.460 everybody gets two senators or something i don't know the point is that they stand up and they say

00:20:18.220 no you know what this is really bad policy for the north and we don't agree with it and we're

00:20:23.340 going to veto it and i think that needs to be there i think we need that system but there was

00:20:29.020 just a post from our neighbor here uh mr rustad we were gonna screen share that or at least at

00:20:34.300 least read it out to you one way or the other um i'll uh i'll uh yeah we'll screen share in just

00:20:41.100 a moment but the point the point that needs to be drawn here is that this is a super this is super

00:20:46.140 dangerous politically if uh if we go forward with this so so i'm just gonna read this on behalf of

00:20:52.140 former minister rustad obviously they're out of government so he's not a minister right now

00:20:56.060 We'd like to call him the minister around here. Today, the BC NDP government introduced an

00:21:00.700 Electoral Boundary Commission bill with the stated goal of adding six new ridings and eliminating

00:21:04.600 the protection of rural ridings. I will need to go through this bill in detail, but on the surface,

00:21:08.980 here is what it will likely mean. BC has about 5.3 million people, we're the largest of the

00:21:13.360 four Western provinces. Increasing MLAs from 87 to 93 members, the average riding population

00:21:18.580 should be about 57,000 people. Okay, yep, that sounds about right. From 100 Mile House North,

00:21:24.220 there is about 340,000 people at 57,000.

00:21:28.440 The North could have as few as six seats

00:21:30.280 from its current 10 seats.

00:21:32.100 The Electoral Boundary Commission

00:21:33.160 can still use the very special circumstances,

00:21:35.740 but they will likely only use that

00:21:37.940 for two or three ridings at most.

00:21:39.200 The results will likely be a reduction in the North,

00:21:41.540 representation by two or three seats

00:21:43.140 and one from the Kootenays.

00:21:45.200 Combined with the added seats,

00:21:46.280 the balance of electoral representation

00:21:47.520 in BC will forever be changed

00:21:48.940 as the new seats and the reduced seats

00:21:50.980 will be located in the Lower Mainland.

00:21:53.260 You can influence this process, da-da-da-da-da-da, contact your representatives, send emails and letters to the Electoral Boundary Commission, da-da-da-da-da-da, et cetera, et cetera. I endorse that fully. I endorse that fully. I'm sure that there's plenty of places where me and Mr. Rustad could disagree. And of course, I just had some things to say about the BC Liberals and who doesn't.

00:22:17.060 but the point is that that is about as about as uh you know succinct a statement as can be made

00:22:23.620 about this situation this is bad and it's politically dangerous it's politically dangerous

00:22:27.660 because when the people who grow all the food and pump all the gas and do all the mining and

00:22:33.480 mow down all the trees and turn it into lumber when those people feel like they don't have a

00:22:38.180 voice anymore something tells me that things aren't going to go so well for the people in

00:22:43.240 the lower mainland you know something tells me that you know instead of them blocking our pipelines

00:22:48.380 we're just going to turn off the taps and again i don't want to get into a us versus them sort of

00:22:53.180 argument but it's it's it's a statement of fact you cannot have you cannot call it democracy when

00:22:59.660 people are fundamentally not represented right if if democracy is the vox populi right the voice of

00:23:05.140 the people then and it's government by the people of the people and for the people to quote a certain

00:23:10.280 Mr. Lincoln. The fact of the matter is that you need proper representation. But this has always

00:23:18.140 been the tension in democracy. Do you do it by fairness or do you do it by justice? This has

00:23:23.460 always been a tension inside of political realities. And it goes all the way back to

00:23:28.460 Plato. It goes all the way back to the founding documents of any nation, any state, anywhere.

00:23:33.000 The tension between, is it done by justice? A man is accorded what he works? Or does he have

00:23:39.120 certain inherent rights or privileges that are done to him out of fairness that anybody regardless

00:23:44.640 of their background or creed has a right to something this will always be this will end as

00:23:50.160 julie points out yeah it's both well it is both but it's but it's a it's it's a tension

00:23:56.480 it's a tension and one of the places where it gets very clear is exactly this moment when

00:24:03.760 we have too many people in the south there's too many people crowding into the lower mainland

00:24:08.240 because of the weather, because of the climate, because of the supposed opportunities, though I

00:24:12.540 couldn't really imagine working for some of the slave wages that are down there. There are some

00:24:16.000 wages down there that are okay because they are compensating for the cost of living down there,

00:24:20.160 but those are a lot of wages that are terrible. And people are all just fighting for kind of the

00:24:24.500 same thing and having to climb the ladder. You couldn't pay me to live down there. I wouldn't do

00:24:29.080 it. But, you know, I guess God bless the people who do and God bless the people who actually have

00:24:33.440 the tenacity to do it but the point is that you have this tiny tiny little space called the lower

00:24:41.280 mainland and it is tiny you can drive through the lower mainland if everybody was cleared off the

00:24:45.320 road if you had if you had perfect access from from hope to the swassen ferry terminal and even

00:24:52.520 back up to horseshoe bay and then even across the ferry and around victoria you could if you were

00:24:57.940 starting from hope you could drive all of that at a decent clip including the ferry time in a day

00:25:04.740 that's how small it is that's how small it is you could do it it would be a long day like make no

00:25:09.880 mistake it would be a long long day but it could be done it could absolutely be done in fact let's

00:25:16.520 just say it was from hope to swassen over to victoria you touch your toe on the other side of

00:25:22.380 victoria in the in the sea you come back you get back on the ferry you land at horseshoe

00:25:27.500 and then you drive the northern route uh on the north side of the river to get out uh to get back

00:25:33.380 to hope that's that would be a long day but it is absolutely possible it's absolutely possible with

00:25:41.240 with and even in the traffic it is it would take you less than two days to do it and so the problem

00:25:46.340 is the problem is that that that's a very small space but it has all the people in it and you

00:25:52.120 do that on a donkey on a day ah fair enough the point is the point is that it's a very small

00:25:56.920 space that's what i'm trying to emphasize here and and that tiny space has all the people in it

00:26:02.040 i get that but all their food and clothing and all of their all of their supplies all their gas

00:26:08.920 all their electricity it doesn't come from where they live it comes from where i live

00:26:13.560 and there needs to be an equitable exchange we're using that word all the time nowadays right equity

00:26:18.360 right we need to have equality and fairness and everything else well that needs to be equitable

00:26:23.480 right the work that we put in up here and the the weather we suffer up here and the logistical

00:26:29.240 difficulties we have up here what we pay in taxes to keep our roads cleared all of that up here

00:26:36.360 needs to be represented in some form of appreciation down there as well as

00:26:40.920 a political appreciation where we can have a fair exchange right and so this is where things get

00:26:47.240 difficult. So if we're going to redraw the boundaries, maybe they need to be redrawn.

00:26:50.840 That's fine. But then we need to start seriously talking about, honestly, another form of

00:26:55.780 representation at the provincial level. And I think I personally think that's going to have

00:27:00.860 to be a Senate. Otherwise, you're going to have to keep kind of weighting the scale, put your thumb

00:27:04.720 on the scale, right? And have the rule writings always kind of protected and always somewhat

00:27:10.000 over-representing the people there. But it's a balance. It's an exchange. It is just. It's not

00:27:15.440 fair but it is just because the people in the rural ridings do hold the balance not of power

00:27:22.700 in population but they hold the balance of responsibility when it comes to the production

00:27:27.960 of power the production of of all the all the needs and necessities of modern life you can't

00:27:35.760 turn on your nice little gas range stove without the pipeline that comes through my neighborhood

00:27:40.020 it just doesn't work that way you can't you can't build even your futuristic electric cars

00:27:45.020 without the minerals that are going to be mined in my neighborhood.

00:27:49.300 That's reality.

00:27:50.680 And ironically, there's a kind of reverse onus here.

00:27:53.860 So the Lower Mainland always went on and on and on

00:27:56.540 about how they were scared of the pipeline

00:27:58.300 when it came to Northern Gateway, I mean,

00:28:00.180 and like the leaks and everything else.

00:28:01.820 And then, of course, Christy Clark had her five conditions,

00:28:03.940 blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:28:04.960 What I would try to emphasize here

00:28:06.720 is that why is this any different

00:28:09.640 when it comes to a sort of political, you know, political issue, right?

00:28:14.600 why is this why why can't it be the same sort of attitude taken on a political issue look

00:28:19.880 we're really scared of this not this pipeline but these new lines these new political lines

00:28:25.220 that are going to amalgamate our writings and make our representation less and so we have these

00:28:30.200 conditions there needs to be these things addressed before you change these things and this is our

00:28:35.820 neighborhood this is our backyard and this is our political future we're talking about and it is not

00:28:41.340 fair that i don't care how many people live down there i don't care i don't you can't have the

00:28:48.420 rest of us treated as a bunch of serfs in the hinterland you can't do that because that's going

00:28:52.580 to breed resentment and as i made a point in the opening statement you think western sovereignty is

00:28:57.380 a problem just wait until that happens northern bc will will do something politically it will it

00:29:04.520 will do its best to isolate vancouver and and that'll go real bad real bad because we don't

00:29:10.040 need British Columbians at each other's throat. That wouldn't be good. And we don't need people 0.61

00:29:13.580 fighting over this. It's very logical. We need some kind of equitable arrangement where Northern

00:29:18.920 British Columbians, who are of all stripes, by the way, yes, they might as a general rule lean

00:29:23.980 more right wing, but what they actually lean is just more libertarian. They're just less involved

00:29:30.120 with their local love. They're less involved with the idea of there being so much to do,

00:29:36.320 so much to be so much so much life in their in their community side of things in in the sense

00:29:41.100 of like of like a civics right like i'm part of this great thing called vancouver i'm part of this

00:29:45.460 great thing called you know surrey and that's fine that's fine i don't have a problem with

00:29:49.700 people doing that but up north here i mean a lot of us do just get on our quads ride to the bush

00:29:54.280 it's a different kind of community ethics a little bit different it is a bit more like

00:29:58.580 freeholders coming together instead of you know renters of condos and that sort of thing uh

00:30:03.780 joining together and doing something. There are different kind of stances. This isn't to denigrate

00:30:07.700 that other stance. But the point that I'm trying to drive home here just before we bring on

00:30:11.540 John is that ultimately British Columbia isn't going to survive as a political entity if you

00:30:19.620 have a lack of representation in Northern British Columbia. People are going to, people are going to,

00:30:25.160 they're going to lose their minds. That's not going to happen. And I don't know if that means

00:30:29.140 that Alberta will finally get a coastline because Northern BC finally rebels and just joins Alberta.

00:30:33.780 I don't know about that. That sounds a bit steep. But certainly, if we feel any more alienated than

00:30:40.180 we already do, it's not going to work out well. We're going to bring on John C. Thompson right

00:30:45.480 now, of course, a founding member of Civitas. And he is here to tell us about conservatism as it

00:30:51.220 stands today, in the past and in the future, and just what he's been up to in the meanwhile.

00:30:56.260 Welcome to the program, John. Thank you for inviting me.

00:31:00.280 Absolutely.

00:31:01.040 Well, it was Stuart who put us in contact with each other. 0.98

00:31:04.380 Stuart's been very helpful in finding me a blue chip guest such as yourself.

00:31:08.020 And I appreciate the email you sent me earlier about who else I should be bringing on the show.

00:31:12.860 That'd be great.

00:31:13.420 Again, we always want invitations both from our guests and from our viewers about who should be on the show.

00:31:18.960 And that's always very helpful.

00:31:20.280 But, John, thank you for coming on.

00:31:21.580 And why don't you just tell us a little bit about your background and what Civitas was?

00:31:25.920 well uh for a start uh personally i was in the the military for 13 years and then also uh spent

00:31:34.000 about 35 years in a pair of uh think tanks that were defense and security oriented the canadian

00:31:40.800 institute of strategic studies and the mckenzie institute uh civitas uh really uh it's not

00:31:49.120 something that to generally talk about it's uh um an annual event that has been suspended for a

00:31:56.800 couple of years but uh it's sort of where a number of conservatives come together and talk off the

00:32:03.680 record for a weekend or so and uh i've been involved with that since more or less since it

00:32:10.480 started more or less since it started so so off the record why why did it need to be off the record

00:32:18.160 what was the uh what was exactly the issue there was it thought was it just able to better think

00:32:24.560 through what they needed to do or was it because with a camera in their face suddenly they reverted

00:32:28.560 to talking points instead of philosophy well it actually was like freedom of expression and

00:32:33.520 freedom of thought you know for for two days anything was on the table anything could be

00:32:38.640 discussed and you know things weren't always smooth i mean there are issues that conservatives

00:32:45.120 we'll disagree with quite vehemently about but at the same time uh there's a good chance to uh

00:32:50.560 sort of come out with a common policy and sometimes you know we were

00:32:57.280 very very closely with political parties other times we were way off in the wilderness

00:33:04.160 some of some of that issue in and of itself like canada isn't famous for its think tanks in the

00:33:09.840 way that the states are i know that i know that there you know there's a couple of things hanks

00:33:14.000 in canada that if you reference them like people know what they are immediately but even somebody

00:33:18.240 who's politically informed by my like myself like even the mckenzie institute i had heard of it but

00:33:23.360 i had heard of it like as an echo being shouted from you know a little ways away i didn't know

00:33:28.400 much about it i'm hoping to learn more about it while you're on the show with us today but why do

00:33:33.440 you think that is in canada why why don't we have the same kind of intellectual rigor around these

00:33:39.760 issues that they do in the united states well i think we run into two problems that are inimicable

00:33:46.720 to being canadian and the first is the problem we have on just about everything is that you know we

00:33:54.340 are a very thin spread out population in a 6 000 kilometer arc that's about 200 kilometers wide

00:34:02.780 i mean we don't do anything simply you know we can't that's just the the physics of our country

00:34:10.360 um the other thing of course so is that is related to the physics is that since uh i mean the national

00:34:18.360 railways were built we can't do much without government financing and canadians have got

00:34:25.000 in the habit of expecting uh government to take care of things so that independent intellectual

00:34:33.480 life in canada is very very much suspended and and it's always been that way

00:34:39.800 we have some of it inside of our kind of the population sinks we do have but more like more

00:34:47.400 like even the universities we have so there are some there's clearly at some of the universities

00:34:51.840 there's definitely discussions that go on around certain policies certain ideas the calgary school

00:34:57.120 for example is very clearly uh at the forefront of some right-wing economic policy or certainly

00:35:03.160 certainly free market economic policy and of course most universities are are left-wing in in

00:35:08.480 their uh political uh dispensation but nonetheless like you'd think that at least there uh you would

00:35:14.220 have something but even there i think the closest we get honestly in in in bc is they kind of seem

00:35:18.940 to have some kind of uh repository of of people to think about stuff at at ubc and then the next

00:35:25.600 time i hear that somebody's thinking about anything it's out of maybe toronto maybe montreal and every

00:35:31.180 now and again something comes out of dalhousie because dalhousie's got a decent law school and

00:35:35.200 that sort of thing so it doesn't seem to be again like again between calgary vancouver toronto

00:35:40.300 montreal and and at some point nova scotia i guess uh it it doesn't there isn't again that

00:35:45.700 like even the universities don't seem to be putting out as as hard as they could the ideas

00:35:50.940 that they could or the the policies that they'd recommend well i mean the universities have also

00:35:56.520 falling down with job but uh i mean if you look at the number of think tanks that are in the in

00:36:01.640 the country they that exist now they're very few and far between that you know of the sort that

00:36:08.120 we're on the original american model um the fraser institute has got an international reputation

00:36:15.000 that's one uh on the other hand you know the ndp has got the pembina institute which it survives

00:36:22.680 on you know government funding um you got the mcdonald laurier institute which is a

00:36:29.400 brilliant and bold experiment that sort of combined conservative and liberals perspectives

00:36:34.920 or classical liberal perspectives in ottawa and not much else um and what you also have are you

00:36:41.960 know the institutions that used to exist but for the last 40 years i mean post-modernist thought

00:36:49.640 has infected all of them uh so they're few and far between the other problem and this is something i

00:36:55.560 can speak to uh a lot more immediately was that uh it's very hard to fund it to get funding for

00:37:03.480 any sort of think tank out of canadians generally i mean we are not that charitable um and if you

00:37:12.440 were doing anything that was of any sort of worth at all people kept thinking well if if what you're

00:37:17.880 doing is so useful you know why isn't government funding and of course if you do get government

00:37:24.440 funding and this is the case with the canadian institute of strategic studies um after a while

00:37:30.360 they start dictating what you find uh with the mckenzie institute when i was running it um

00:37:36.920 we were very very narrowly funded i was performing small miracles on a regular basis trying to make

00:37:42.760 sure that we had a very outsized influence on a very narrow shoestring my successor turned to

00:37:52.440 government sources broke the rule that had been originally set up that we never full

00:37:58.280 rely on public funding and it's doesn't exist anymore or you know it's

00:38:06.440 maybe once in a while they get a check and make some remark and no one's ever heard of them

00:38:10.520 a shell of its former self

00:38:14.000 and that's the perennial problem

00:38:18.100 because we also have a society that's got a very strong

00:38:22.360 civil service and if you were not

00:38:26.100 if you were saying something they don't like you know the check comes late

00:38:30.140 so you really can't be independent

00:38:33.700 it's an ongoing difficulty inside of Canada

00:38:38.380 a kind of bizarre thing it seems like canada was built in various uh again dispensations right there

00:38:43.660 was our founding uh they built the railroad they managed to keep building stuff until basically

00:38:48.860 mackenzie gets in mackenzie manages to build things and then eventually we get into a more 0.76

00:38:53.340 restrictive stance we build the social welfare state which puts kind of bureaucrats everywhere

00:38:57.980 and then we kind of get into this weird neoliberal model through the late 80s into the 90s and we

00:39:02.540 still haven't seemed to shaken that off completely it's just we're just stuck in different kind of

00:39:06.780 portions all our buildings are from the 70s our economic policy is from the neoliberal era

00:39:11.020 and and people are talking like it's you know wokeism has been around forever it doesn't really

00:39:16.140 canada is very much a hodgepodge of all sorts of things if it is a mosaic it's it's not exactly

00:39:21.980 the most beautifully built one perhaps something you can speak to john is is precisely kind of

00:39:28.860 your your beginnings in this world of of like being being a consultant being inside of the

00:39:34.780 think tank world giving ideas about this in such a hostile environment as canada for such things

00:39:40.940 what did you find with that and what how did you kind of find your way there uh in some ways it was

00:39:47.740 uh sort of uh by error um when i was a junior officer on a military exercise i was running a

00:39:55.900 night patrol uh we were dressed as soviet troops uh and i sold a brigadier general's map from his

00:40:02.380 headquarters um that actually ended up with me having a job as an intelligence officer for a

00:40:08.700 while and that ended up with me being recruited into the canadian institute of strategic studies

00:40:14.460 and from there it sort of went on but again everything was i had a couple of very good

00:40:20.780 mentors both both of whom have moved on this time uh brian mcdonald and then later on morris

00:40:26.700 dugwell but again the mackenzie institute had been created originally as a product of the cold war

00:40:36.540 but as soon as i took over the cold war ended i was looking around for uh for new tasks and

00:40:42.780 i focused on a political extremism and organized crime and you know carved out a niche there but

00:40:50.940 it was very hard to uh get a lot of support especially say when we're doing things like

00:40:57.820 looking at the relationship between the mohawk warriors and the black market and cigarettes 0.88

00:41:02.860 or uh going after the tamil tigers when they were busy playing the the multicultural game 0.98

00:41:08.300 with canadian politicians and nobody was paying attention to the fact that they were victimizing

00:41:13.660 the tamil community like nobody's business so i mean a long legacy of that actually in canada

00:41:22.220 particularly i'm thinking of in in british columbia even both both uh both sides of the chinese

00:41:27.740 conflict that is to say both the communists and the nationalists uh came to vancouver to fundraise

00:41:33.100 in order to in order to support their causes so canada has been the basis and i'm sure that

00:41:37.660 things happen there uh as well in inside of inside of the indo community uh when it comes to questions

00:41:43.180 of some of the agitations that happened back home.

00:41:45.520 Canada has always been a hotbed

00:41:47.180 for this kind of activity,

00:41:48.860 going all the way back to the Fenians, I think.

00:41:51.640 Well, remember, the Fenians were instrumental

00:41:54.100 in Canadian achieving their independence

00:41:57.200 in the first place.

00:41:58.340 And so far, we've been blessed

00:42:01.180 because we really only have two political assassinations.

00:42:04.340 But the first one was when Fenians went after,

00:42:07.460 typically, an Irish-Canadian politician,

00:42:10.880 Dorothy McGee, who denounced them.

00:42:13.180 you know and that's actually the usual case and if we look at the the barbaculsa and seek

00:42:18.700 extremists their first victims were speaks we're trying to oppose them you know and and that's been

00:42:24.700 a pattern for a long time again one of the handicaps about canada comes right back again

00:42:30.780 to our our isolation and and our nature that we are a small spread out strip of population

00:42:38.140 against you know the wilderness in winter is that most canadians have a very hard time really

00:42:44.380 believing that anybody from outside of canada is a significant threat so when you you've got

00:42:52.140 foreign agents you've got terrorist groups you've got organized transnational organized crime groups

00:42:57.820 and most canadians fall into the sort of little uh who us little old us you know these are exotic

00:43:04.380 problems for other people they're not problems for us we forget our own history

00:43:11.020 i think some people i think some people don't really realize too that the true canadian virtue

00:43:17.420 as far as i can tell is sanctimony just as long as we're not americans as long as and who could

00:43:23.900 we be uh we we're not we're our companies never abuse foreign foreign interests and foreign

00:43:29.020 contracts right it's like that's an american thing to do us canadians would never would never

00:43:33.500 not conformed to ethical standards and that sort of thing we should look at lav scam that was not

00:43:37.500 the first time that happened i know i'm not telling you anything uh things like that are

00:43:41.500 pretty common again well canada used to have a the reputation of my spanish is almost non-existent

00:43:47.980 but the uh el pupil secundo in the in the caribbean you know the second octopus at the united states

00:43:55.580 uh and i've heard europeans uh complain about the anglo-saxon mafia you know where we are junior

00:44:01.580 partners to the the british and americans and a lot of things but um it sort of it goes on from

00:44:07.740 there um again the sanctimony is is one of the new sort of neo-vert uh virtues the um

00:44:19.020 i mean if you look at the way canada used to be established i mean

00:44:24.300 some of the strongest canadian characteristics which still exist i think in your own neighborhood

00:44:29.980 or northern alberta and northern ontario is independence you know and the idea that you

00:44:35.900 are important not because of who you are but because of what you do you know the the traditional

00:44:41.900 point that canadians for 200 years stood against the wilderness to cope with it and that was one

00:44:48.700 of our original uh virtues we were a pioneering society i mean this whole you know we're not

00:44:55.660 american sanctimony i mean that's this another thread running through canada's history but

00:45:02.700 it wasn't really that much that important until the late 20th century

00:45:09.340 it's interesting that you point this out because i i truly believe that that we've lost something

00:45:14.940 in in our ethic in our in our understanding we're we are hewers of wood and drawers of water um you

00:45:21.580 We don't need what they have on it, not to throw the Americans out of the bus completely, but they have that poem tacked on to their beautiful Statue of Liberty, give us your weak, your tired, your poor. 0.91

00:45:31.980 I always thought that Robert Service's spell of the Yukon was much more appropriate, or the law of the Yukon. 0.98

00:45:39.840 Give me not your weak, your tired, your poor, them I crush under my feet.

00:45:44.760 Canada's a tough place, and it's a tough place for tough people.

00:45:47.220 What happened to that toughness? What happened to our ability to to overcome the elements and build logistics that are the envy of the world?

00:45:54.360 We just don't seem to build anything anymore.

00:45:56.520 Well, we lost that myth somewhere. Personally, I think actually, you know, in a very weird way, we probably lost it in 1982 when Stan Rogers died in an aircraft fire.

00:46:08.380 you know if you may remember the folk singer but uh you know if you've ever listened to the

00:46:14.280 northwest passage that was probably the the last song we ever produced that really touched

00:46:19.320 a large part of canadian history and a large part of our sort of our founding culture and

00:46:25.600 the drive behind us how many other songs do you know that mention ben franklin and david thompson

00:46:32.360 and David Kelso and all the rest and we've lost that I mean we have a

00:46:39.500 heavily urbanized culture especially in the you know the Laurentide triangle

00:46:44.860 that has been carefully defined they've lost touch with Canada you know they

00:46:51.240 don't come out in their youth anymore and explore the wilderness the way that

00:46:55.640 was once expected of most Canadians

00:46:59.440 is there a way to facilitate a rebirth of that and and is that maybe a way to link the whole

00:47:05.280 question of think tanks which in a sense i'm not saying the think tanks don't tell us anything

00:47:09.740 rational but they are trying to shape a narrative so they're trying to help us understand our myth

00:47:15.060 right our mythos about ourselves and so is is there a place there where we need we need the

00:47:20.220 right kind of cultural uh implementation happening so that our culture shifts and that people

00:47:26.420 politically start to move back towards a place of independence um it's one of the strange things i

00:47:33.540 wrote because i mean with all the uh the essays and reports and everything else we've done over

00:47:37.860 the years i've occasionally written stuff for my own pleasure uh but in one case i actually wrote a

00:47:45.380 an essay uh well sort of a short story about uh just for fun but about having a strange bear

00:47:52.820 experience and uh began uh with an introduction said there's three things it's a theory i've all

00:48:01.220 always had you know any country on earth you look at three experiences or three things that are

00:48:07.300 unique to that country and if you've gone through all three you could only belong to that country

00:48:12.340 in canada they are one that you have learned to appreciate something about winter don't have to

00:48:18.500 love winter but there has to be something you look forward to uh pierre burton made the remark

00:48:23.620 that a canadian is someone who knows how to make love in a canoe and i think again and really in

00:48:29.220 canada maybe not but you've probably got to give it some thought at some time and then realize it's

00:48:35.700 probably safer to go to your tent and the air mattress is there but the third thing is you have

00:48:40.260 to have an experience experience with a bear that was that was my original and that was my lead into

00:48:45.860 a recollection about a strange bear but i mean canada we had how many others of the the g20

00:48:54.180 nations have major mammal forms i mean we had a few years ago in toronto rush hour completely

00:49:00.980 thrown by deer running around the downtown core you know if if you look out of the windows in

00:49:06.740 ottawa look north into the gatineau hills i mean moose and bear are up there and everything else

00:49:12.500 we the wilderness hangs over us and it really should define us and more of us need to experience

00:49:18.500 it frequently and that actually and also of course not run south in the winter but

00:49:26.180 face the winter and and you know tackle it head on and that actually reconnects us with

00:49:31.860 a lot of the canadian identity that we've lost and it turns us back into the country

00:49:37.140 that we've always been in some respects even with the the first nations you know and the first

00:49:43.300 european encounters they had you know that's something that's not generally remembered but

00:49:49.220 how did samuel champlain make it through his first winter novice you know the micmac came out and

00:49:54.820 taught him how to avoid scurvy um samuel hearn exploring the northwest territories and he starts

00:50:01.220 to you know winter with the uh the the first nations on great slave lake and uh you know

00:50:08.740 he's impatient once winter sets in to resume his explorations and

00:50:15.140 uh the chief says i can't send you out i wouldn't have anyone said that i had sent

00:50:20.500 strangers out to die alone in the wilderness and uh parents says well you know i gotta go

00:50:26.580 on the explorer i have to continue and the chief says okay i'll send some men with you

00:50:30.680 And Hearn goes, well, I thought you said they'd die.

00:50:32.660 And the chief goes, yeah, they would.

00:50:35.080 But I wouldn't have anyone say that I sent a guest out to die alone in the wilderness.

00:50:40.740 I mean, that is part woven right into the bone of our country.

00:50:47.080 And we forget it.

00:50:48.900 I had the privilege of being up where Samuel Hearn was the proctor of the fort.

00:50:55.060 I was up in Churchill, Manitoba last year.

00:50:57.480 I'd been there once before.

00:50:58.660 I was working up there during the whole COVID experience, and it was interesting to kind of see the star for it and kind of look at things.

00:51:06.820 Actually, while I was there, I met Dorothy Dobie, former Parle Secretary for what was then called Indian Affairs, I believe, in the Mulroney government.

00:51:14.360 And she let me write for a magazine for a short time, Lifestyles 55, I think, in town here, or sorry, throughout Western Canada, based in Winnipeg, I believe.

00:51:23.640 and uh and i kind of was their token their token guide up north talking to these things you know

00:51:29.260 and and and writing about these things and one of the points i made is that you know canadians

00:51:33.360 really don't even know what's in their own backyard like the staycation i actually liked

00:51:37.340 that covid caused a staycation uh to your point of the snowbirds i was raised in a family that

00:51:42.060 believed that being a snowbird was all but a mortal sin uh so we did not do that uh that was

00:51:47.600 wrong you don't go to warm places in winter you go and face the elements uh so you ski and you

00:51:52.060 snowboard and whatever else but but but to the point of churchill and everything it was

00:51:55.260 we had people coming up there basically only from western canada because ontario was locked down the

00:52:00.460 maritimes were put building a great wall but in but in western canada people came up and they

00:52:05.160 couldn't go anywhere else they had wanted to go to europe they'd wanted to go to the states they

00:52:08.220 wanted to go to asia but they can't go anywhere because of covid and they and they all said the

00:52:12.080 same thing at the conclusion of their tours they said i never knew this was up here it's like well

00:52:15.980 this is the second largest country on earth you think that we do some you know a damn better job

00:52:20.820 of of shipping people around and having them see it well that's part of it and there's a lot of

00:52:27.340 other things about canada most canadians don't know because again we really abandoned the teaching

00:52:33.180 of our history except for you know very very narrow fields for example if you ask most canadians

00:52:39.780 you know what is the founding document of canada they'll talk about the british north america act

00:52:45.320 have you read the surrender agreement for montreal from 1761

00:52:53.000 i have no you have no i have not oh okay well most people haven't but that's where

00:53:00.200 you know when the french were on their way out and you know the british signed the treaty with

00:53:05.160 them for the formal negotiation of the surrender of montreal on the end of french canada but

00:53:11.560 the last governor general of quebec and general amherst who was running the british agreed

00:53:17.080 to say respect the french language respect the catholic church and that the british would keep

00:53:22.600 good relations with the first nation that is you know right in our that is our very foundation

00:53:30.040 and no one's ever read it you know that's just one example you know that's the other point too i mean

00:53:37.080 that fatuous senator in 1922 who said that we were far from sources of conflagration you know

00:53:44.280 it's one of the aspects of canada we forget about is that we were born in superpower conflict between

00:53:50.840 the british and french there were something like 140 major battles and sieges in canada

00:53:57.080 before this country was ever created and most canadians are completely oblivious to the industry

00:54:02.840 and there are many other things besides that

00:54:06.240 I think part of it must come down

00:54:10.420 to the fact though that I'm thinking of

00:54:12.680 I believe it was the big shift, it got mentioned in the big shift

00:54:16.660 I believe Iverson helped write that or maybe it was something else Iverson helped write

00:54:20.360 where he was remembering back to his own boyhood I think

00:54:24.320 with the glorious 12th so of course a Protestant holy day as it were

00:54:28.560 of resistance when the Protestants managed to

00:54:32.520 triumph over their catholic for bears it it and so that reference right and of course masons versus

00:54:38.280 knights of columbus and that sort of thing french versus english like even that milieu is kind of

00:54:42.620 being left behind the only people who understand those references i'm not sure i'm not sure if you

00:54:47.780 a fellow captain also out of the military uh sheldon clare uh retired as well um but the

00:54:53.540 president of national firearms association i mean we should get you guys both on here we had him on

00:54:57.360 here yesterday we should get you guys both on here to to riff about the history and the lack of

00:55:01.240 education in history we have in this country because he teaches uh history here in in prince

00:55:06.340 george at the college and and this is the same point like no he's the only one who kind of gets

00:55:10.960 my references to that when he shows up wearing his wearing his uh black hat and his black vest

00:55:16.500 on saint patrick's day to pipe um i i remember looking at him like well you're a black you know

00:55:21.840 you're you're a black protestant you know various other expletives like as a joke and he's like well

00:55:26.200 you're the only person who's noticed who knows anymore well uh actually i used to live in 0.68

00:55:32.840 downtown toronto in an apartment right off of bay street uh but uh i'm uh partly irish descent

00:55:40.040 and you know it was sort of uh okay i know who the orange lodge were but i didn't really

00:55:46.400 you know inherit the hatred of them i mean i was just aware of them but i was actually kind of

00:55:51.900 uh pleased to see uh a king billy and the uh july 12th parade once a year but

00:56:00.700 it's kind of funny because you know the traditional orangeman of 15 or 100 years ago would

00:56:05.980 blanch at the current parade because you wouldn't believe who makes up most of the paraders

00:56:11.900 people from the caribbeans and the philippines but you know there's still like king billy on

00:56:16.700 his white horse and there's you know six or seven people following uh slowly wearing orange sashes

00:56:23.580 and i'm sort of pleased to see them just because someone was keeping up the old ways even if this

00:56:28.940 didn't mean a punch-up um but you know again that's part of his uh history that okay maybe

00:56:36.540 it's all right that we lost it but we should still remember that it was there uh to another point uh

00:56:43.660 the regiment i was most associated with when i was served and it still exists but again most people

00:56:49.340 have never heard of it except for that uh ridiculous american show turned but the first

00:56:55.180 governor of ontario was john graves simcoe he was the ceo of the queen's rangers in the american

00:57:01.980 revolution you know here we have a regiment from 1756 the first regiment raised by the british in

00:57:09.420 north america which came north because it fought for the crown in the american revolution and

00:57:15.560 that's again a part of canadian history that's completely overlooked um some of the quebec

00:57:21.220 regiments have apparently traced their uh ancestry to the colonial militia that the french had

00:57:27.760 and again yeah ancient traditions long overlooked and forgotten and they're precious they're worth

00:57:34.580 remembering it sounds to me like we have an education problem that's that all that adds up

00:57:42.200 to for me is an education question and the only the only other thing then maybe also experientially

00:57:47.420 which is something that i did mention in when i was writing for dorothy and uh i've mentioned

00:57:52.380 before in my previous digs uh as a columnist at the local paper here in prince george uh which i

00:57:57.340 wrote for for seven years the the i feel like we need to do better at this there almost does need

00:58:03.320 to be a federal level of an education strategy if for no other reason than whenever we start

00:58:08.380 getting those dirigibles to ship stuff north we can put the kids on them and in the meantime we'll

00:58:12.940 put the kids on the via rail stuff like I don't know why we don't put you know school-aged children

00:58:17.780 and adolescents onto the via rail and send them around the country and be like this is your 0.57

00:58:21.540 country and we're going to take you for a horse ride and a buggy ride and we're going to show 1.00

00:58:25.060 you what a red wagon was and we're going to have you try and figure out how to cure this skin which 0.99

00:58:29.260 is really hard to do like i don't know why we can't do that aspect of education what's wrong 0.99

00:58:33.660 with that i think it'd be more fun for the kids personally well remember that's one problem from

00:58:39.420 post-modernism is the the attempt to completely decouple modern society from its history i mean

00:58:45.980 that's that's written right in there but again uh like in 1972 my boy scout troop uh flew out to

00:58:54.140 vancouver to visit with a boy scout troop in vancouver and we took the train back and it took

00:59:00.940 four days but i still remember that in realizing the enormity of canada you know if you actually

00:59:07.340 had a program where you put kids on the train and put them across the country they'd start to

00:59:11.580 realize more about us um there are other things as well but i mean if we get more people out and

00:59:19.660 facing the wilderness especially when they're young you know that that would reinforce a lot

00:59:25.820 about our identity in addition to actually teaching them some history and again there's

00:59:31.420 things that are forgotten uh like i mentioned john grave simcoe remember under his rule

00:59:38.540 under his leadership upper canada ontario became the first jurisdiction in the british empire to

00:59:44.940 ban slavery you know the whole

00:59:50.300 anti-abolition movement really got started in canada you know and why don't we talk about it

00:59:58.380 you know it's much more important to denigrate him as the uh you know as a a white entitled person

01:00:05.020 and therefore forget about everything he did um canada has also always been well the mistake in

01:00:13.020 1972 was becoming multicultural because a true part of our nature so that we've always been a

01:00:19.820 cosmopolitan society i mean look at who built newfoundland i mean basps and portuguese as well

01:00:27.180 as people from the british isles the first uh synagogue in in north america outside of spanish

01:00:34.140 well the spanish had to hide them but uh was built in halifax and again you know 19th century

01:00:41.020 commentators from europe couldn't believe how diverse canadian cities were british war artists

01:00:47.100 in the first world war were captivated by canadian troops they couldn't believe

01:00:51.420 there were so many different ethnic types within the canadian infantry platoon

01:00:56.940 and it's something we don't pay attention to at all

01:01:01.660 and and indeed that's something that's changing about our society is that it's getting highlighted

01:01:05.820 now and in a negative light as uh post-modern cultural marxist woke ideology begins to take

01:01:11.820 over it's it's it's a dangerous thing yeah i mean again i i referenced my regiment the first world

01:01:19.180 war we had you know uh six nations members we had uh uh uniform uh a sikh who actually wore

01:01:28.060 turban to france you know we had all these other people in you know as canadian infantry battalion

01:01:35.180 that went to fight in the first world war it wasn't all lost and and that's again another

01:01:41.420 major part of our history that's lost we've always been not a multicultural people but a

01:01:47.740 cosmopolitan people and that's a greater strength that's actually one of the things that we really

01:01:53.020 should look at is that the 1972 multicultural act shows the wrong word and stem from that

01:02:01.500 i i agree i wish we still built the haviland here at least we got the otter going up again

01:02:07.260 viking air down in uh victoria but uh the twin otter that is but uh i i we used to build things

01:02:13.340 in this country used to be proud of our heritage it's it's a shame it's a real shame yeah well we 1.00

01:02:19.100 can do it again maybe we have to uh start to remember that it's time to stop letting china 1.00

01:02:24.300 manufacture so much stuff for us and claw some of it back yeah i believe that is is entirely possible

01:02:30.940 that national economic strategy let's talk a little bit about uh what what then was the harper

01:02:37.820 government trying to do on this count um during the harper era there was talk of redefining canada

01:02:44.380 i think they even thought about building their own statue of liberty i believe she was called

01:02:48.380 mother canada and her arms were going to be outstretched and she was going to be built in

01:02:51.820 nova scotia nobody even talks about that anymore uh stewart often likes to mention that there was

01:02:56.460 supposed to be a reenactment for the war of 1812 to try and redefine canada around 1812 instead of

01:03:03.260 even 1867 or 1967 for that matter in the centennial i don't know if harper was ever going to bring

01:03:09.340 back the ensign i would have loved to bring back the ensign i have one in my room i love it very

01:03:13.580 much but in any case uh something to redefine the country something to bring it back to its roots

01:03:19.260 what happened out of the harper government why didn't it occur well i mean there's only so much

01:03:25.420 And remember, Harper won, what, two elections with minority governments, with the Liberals

01:03:33.060 and the NDP running interference as much as possible, and he had finally the one majority,

01:03:39.400 and then that was it.

01:03:40.400 You know, he was toppled in 2015.

01:03:45.540 The big thing was, I mean, and Harper is one of these people that I think when history

01:03:50.840 examines him he'll be treated a lot more credibly than he was by the electorate in 2015 but he always

01:03:58.920 thought that the worst disaster in in canada was the prime ministership of mackenzie king for so

01:04:06.280 long that mackenzie king had built a canada that became more dependent on a professional civil

01:04:15.240 service and government funding and he'd often talked about wanting to undo that the other

01:04:21.620 point I remember Harper attended a lecture of his in the mid 1990s and he pointed out and this was

01:04:27.900 even before he got back in the political life that the more Canada matured the more our regional

01:04:34.060 identities firmed up and this was some of the the truth that we'd have to face in the coming years

01:04:41.880 i mean he he understood a lot more than most people give him credit for by way of a sort of

01:04:48.280 personal background i debated justin trudeau in 2004 when he was just starting to think about

01:04:55.960 getting back into public life you know i met harper i i've met uh uh well any number of politicians

01:05:04.040 but trudeau you know it was an academic debate at the university in montreal you know the usual

01:05:10.920 thing right yeah we're supposed to everyone was supposed to vote on how

01:05:13.980 they felt about the issue beforehand I'd present in my thesis he present his we

01:05:19.360 need three body each other sum up and then have a second vote that's the way

01:05:23.520 classic debate supposed to go he turned up delivered half an hour of pointed 1.00

01:05:30.240 politics and left and it's clear that he is an idiot you know nowhere near that 1.00

01:05:38.400 the stature that many of his predecessors had even i mean especially in the liberal party 1.00

01:05:44.400 and i still can't believe that actually this country has voted for him twice

01:05:49.840 over uh over harper who was a lot lot brighter

01:05:56.800 and and it's maybe that's the other half of it for canadians that i mean we did we did elect

01:06:03.280 jean cretchen a couple of times i'm not saying jean cretchen isn't a smart man but

01:06:07.520 he was a very good salesman who sold us the same thing three times that he never delivered on uh

01:06:12.080 and and then when paul martin got in who actually was clearly a smart man when it came to fiscal

01:06:16.320 policy and and all that uh we only gave him about half a kick at the cam before we got rid of him

01:06:22.240 you know um so maybe that's the other half of it for for canadians we we like our charismatic

01:06:26.960 leaders mulroney was charismatic trudeau senior was charismatic i don't know if mckenzie king

01:06:31.600 was that charismatic or not, but

01:06:33.340 you know, Diefenbaker was

01:06:34.660 he was the opposite of

01:06:37.180 charismatic, you know, he was

01:06:39.460 you know, a quiet, great Canadian

01:06:41.320 unless you're looking at his

01:06:43.300 personal habits, which were hidden at the time

01:06:45.480 you know, running seances in the

01:06:47.380 Prime Minister's office and collecting

01:06:49.220 ruins and so on and so forth

01:06:50.840 Yeah, what a bizarre man

01:06:53.360 but coming back to this

01:06:55.320 issue with the Harper government and

01:06:57.220 Stephen Harper's legacy

01:06:58.320 it's clear that he

01:07:01.200 wanted to make canada a better place uh i i the further we get away from the harper legacy i i

01:07:07.380 do have a lot of political disagreements actually i think mostly because i've fallen on to kind of

01:07:11.500 the more populous side but but regardless of those what what happened it was it just the civil

01:07:18.100 service resisted him so much yes he didn't he only had one term but why didn't he seize the

01:07:24.040 moment when he could have why didn't he defund the cbc what what was holding him back what did he

01:07:29.240 really believe incrementalism would work when he had seen so much radical change from his opposites

01:07:34.640 for so long? Well, I think the key problem was just so much time and so much attention. I mean,

01:07:42.720 even the nobody has unlimited powers. And, you know, Harper did a lot of stuff that was

01:07:48.660 quite revolutionary. I mean, remember that, for example, most Canadians don't pay attention to

01:07:56.980 how the armed forces acquires equipment but it's a model it's one of the worst in the world you

01:08:02.660 know because again we have so many politicians involved in regional issues and everything else

01:08:08.500 and so uh to say like get something new it involves a 20-year debate to actually decide

01:08:14.740 how we're going to buy it pay for it and where it's going to be built with country but remember

01:08:19.860 uh harper had agreed that the canadians would be fighting in kandahar and suddenly there were

01:08:25.060 equipment problems and it was one of the occasions where uh harper suddenly you know was listening

01:08:30.660 to what the armed forces was saying you know we needed new artillery we needed new tanks we needed

01:08:36.820 the helicopters stuff that we got rid of under chretchen and we needed it in a hurry and he

01:08:42.820 actually he cut through all the red tape and in the hq said you know get out there leopard two

01:08:49.060 tanks buy them off the shelf doesn't matter um we lent out our chinook helicopters and leased them

01:08:58.020 back because we needed them for afghanistan and again you know that was one of the examples where

01:09:04.020 harper was moving very quickly other cases i mean there was a lot of resistance to remember the the

01:09:10.980 supreme court and a lot of the civil servants were fighting very hard against them uh if you recall

01:09:16.340 the um the recollection i remember of some uh staffers for some of the uh cabinet ministers

01:09:26.420 was that they had to constantly be in the office if they didn't have you know the the cabinet of

01:09:35.140 the minister and some of his staffers say on a sunday afternoon they've noticed the civil

01:09:41.380 servants coming in to suddenly issue all sorts of releases and programs and new regulations

01:09:47.620 that weren't supervised i mean the the harper government was in a fight with a

01:09:52.420 this strongly liberal civil service and they had to watch them like hawks

01:09:59.620 so that's a i think another part of the situation i think this time the civil

01:10:03.860 service has finally sort of woken up and smelled what the how bad things can be uh and yeah because

01:10:12.900 again trudeau is nowhere near as professional as any of his predecessors well they they really

01:10:21.540 wanted to win so they put the pretty face in front and they needed to get from third to first and

01:10:26.180 they made all the promises they could and they've managed to kind of rely on that natural governing

01:10:30.980 status to to kind of cruise along um it one of the things that maybe i could get your read on is

01:10:37.480 is this now the situation with covid so again it's you know we in in america this is an ongoing

01:10:43.700 debate amongst the think tank groups right various consultants are brought in uh you know cato has

01:10:49.040 its take on it so does the heritage foundation so does so does uh the hoover institute i personally

01:10:55.100 uh watch probably mostly the hoover institute that's where my if i have my american hat on

01:11:00.280 And that's where my political alignments kind of fall with Victor Davis Hanson in the gang.

01:11:05.020 And so the issue becomes, though, that at least this is being debated in the United States.

01:11:09.720 And there's various jurisdictions doing different things in the United States.

01:11:13.040 Florida is basically totally, South Dakota never locked down.

01:11:16.560 And then there's other states that have tried other things, and they've had mixed results down to terrible, terrible excesses like New York and California.

01:11:24.260 In Canada, we're actually all, it appears, to be under basically the same system except the maritimes.

01:11:29.560 And there's now a consistent fight between provincial health officers who are ruling with no accountability whatsoever and their premiers who are cowed before them.

01:11:40.520 And everything is just there.

01:11:42.980 Like, where's that counter debate?

01:11:45.000 Where is it except in alternative media like this?

01:11:47.320 Where is a think tank or somebody else coming in and saying, no, I, with this intellectual background, can actually tell you that there are some problems here and let's have a discussion?

01:11:56.080 well we again we made sure that that counterbalance doesn't exist i mean look at the media i mean

01:12:06.480 mostly the big media has been suborned especially by the liberals because you know one they've been

01:12:13.440 failing for 30 40 years but right now i mean they're all on federal government financing

01:12:19.440 And they don't, or they very, very seldom challenge the way the Liberals operate.

01:12:26.440 Again, most of the independent think tanks and policy centers and everything else have been strangled.

01:12:35.440 I think the other point is that, you know, we've been engaged in a constant national game of yes minister for the last 50 years.

01:12:44.440 most of our politicians especially the the provincial level aren't that well

01:12:51.340 briefed and then again some of them are conditioned in some strange ways I

01:12:56.680 remember talking in in 1999 we had the major ice storm in Quebec and in

01:13:04.360 Ontario and things were lost you know that you had the power off for some

01:13:10.720 three weeks in February which is you know horrific situation and I remember

01:13:17.140 talking to Janet Ecker who used to be a cabinet minister when a couple of key

01:13:22.480 portfolios in the Harris government and so why aren't we prepared you know we

01:13:28.240 have these emergency preparedness people and then they put a lot of thought in

01:13:31.780 their work you know why didn't we have these materials you actually gave a very

01:13:37.540 candid and very uh pointed remarks that if i was to spend a million dollars on emergency preparedness

01:13:45.780 uh you know i'd be accused of waste and inefficiency and have to fight every inch of

01:13:53.380 the way on the other hand with a crisis like this if i spend a hundred million dollars

01:13:58.260 that's heroic leadership you know we look at canada we had our in uh impact with stars you

01:14:04.580 know we had well yeah going back even before then you know we have had many many epidemics in canada

01:14:12.180 up until you know 19 uh yeah 20. but we knew what the drills were we had all sorts of plans didn't

01:14:19.940 see what happened this time politicians kept overrunning the plans kept ignoring them didn't

01:14:27.940 listen to the professional advice and kept the kept thinking they could improve things on their

01:14:33.140 own so we've had this mishmash of you know all sort of policies from the start and we've handled

01:14:40.980 the whole coping crisis very badly and i think the blame for that really starts at the federal level

01:14:48.820 the other a lot of provincial premiers have tried to do their best and they're playing catch-up or

01:14:54.900 trying to sort of stammer their way to a coherent response in changing circumstances

01:15:03.140 It's something that we were trained in pretty rigorously at Trinity Western.

01:15:08.220 That's my alma mater was Trinity Western before they unfortunately started to slide into wokeism as well, which happened with the generation that came right after mine.

01:15:18.060 I was there at a very particular time, kind of still rigor, both left wing and right wing, real debates, a free expression and no postmodernism infecting any of the ideas.

01:15:29.760 is very, very rigorous debates and right wing, left wing, Catholic, Protestant, all that being

01:15:34.040 there and very, very well done, very civil and strong. And but one of the things we were put

01:15:40.260 through at Trinity quite a bit was, of course, George Grant's thesis on lament for a nation and

01:15:44.620 what had happened to Canada and also the idea of technocracy, the idea that that technology

01:15:50.460 and justice, again, mentioned by George Grant, but technocracy in general had kind of infected

01:15:55.600 canada in fact the west in general but that that that there was this this problem of of you know

01:16:02.940 the the the tail wagging the dog that that we had a system that was basically running us we had uh

01:16:09.840 ways of of doing and being that were no longer human ways they were now they were now kind of

01:16:15.540 inherently uh technocratic inherently uh imminent uh they had their own inertia and we had to run

01:16:22.160 for the hamster wheel, not the hamster wheel for us. And so maybe that's part of it when it comes

01:16:27.460 to COVID is that even up until a few minutes ago, but now in combination with political correctness,

01:16:34.120 you know, maybe even SARS, we could kind of get away with it the way it was because, well,

01:16:39.000 people were still, they didn't feel divided at some kind of base level around their very identity.

01:16:44.360 But now that we have identitarian politics, we have alternative forms of news, there's a consensus

01:16:50.120 media and a non-consensus media there's still that intellectual vacuum that we've just been

01:16:55.180 discussing about the lack of their lack of of think tanks in this country what what is going

01:17:00.660 on here like what with covid i think that i think that in many respects the inmates are running the

01:17:05.940 asylum and nobody nobody trusts them they don't trust them as leaders anymore and i don't know

01:17:11.000 if there's a way to get out of that and i don't know if anyone will ever trust their leaders again 0.89

01:17:15.220 after this incompetency? In some respects, I think actually what happened is a perfect storm.

01:17:22.360 You know, there were a number of trends that built together over a period of time. I mean,

01:17:26.860 we talk about postmodernism and how it slowly expanded. A little while ago, you're remembering

01:17:33.560 Christopher Lash, I think, in his book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. 0.96

01:17:39.340 um who read john ralston's halls voltaire's bastards you know on the dictatorship of reason in

01:17:46.140 the the west i think it was a coffee table book for a lot of people because you know the husband

01:17:51.740 of the governor general had written it but yeah i read it and suddenly realized there was a

01:17:56.780 technocratic elite that was growing stronger and stronger and developing more at the same time i

01:18:03.260 mean i used to do a lot of media commentary i did something like 9 000 interviews in 30 years

01:18:10.220 so i had a front row seat um from the the mid 80s to about 2015 um you know of the canadian media

01:18:19.660 and it was a steady decline you know i used to have to be uh well frightened of some of the

01:18:25.100 people that interviewed me when i was younger in the 1980s because you really had to be prepared

01:18:30.460 for an interview by 2015 you had somebody who was working on six stories a day all they had

01:18:36.540 time for was he said she said you know and they stick a microphone in your face and run off and

01:18:41.660 do the next story and they didn't have any more depth um but one of the other uh interesting

01:18:47.820 points um uh was the internet you know if you remember the kosovo bombings in 1999 you know i 0.55

01:18:55.340 kind of rejoiced in one development because you had a number of serbs who were trying to run

01:19:01.420 against milosevic and milosevic had an old-fashioned propaganda machine he owned the newspapers he

01:19:07.740 owned televisions he owned the radios he controlled almost all the information that came through to

01:19:13.020 search he didn't control the internet and because of that i mean total uh old-fashioned propaganda

01:19:20.620 had to be a total system where you had complete control over all sources of information and with

01:19:26.220 the internet it was no longer possible and if you remember you know in the 1990s the internet was

01:19:34.140 bringing on a new birth of freedom you know a complete wide open safe frontier what i forgot

01:19:41.900 about was the ability of people to propagandize themselves yeah and the internet made that

01:19:49.420 possible so you know because 10 years later you've got all sorts of you know weirdness going on and 0.84

01:19:57.820 totalitarian governments like the russians and the uh and the chinese playing to the new disunity 0.79

01:20:04.460 you can't sell an idea uh through every angle anymore but you can disrupt somebody else's idea 0.53

01:20:12.860 and the internet is really great for that so you had all these things coming together

01:20:17.500 at once and then you had the covid crisis i mean the covid crisis is a perfect storm

01:20:24.380 and we're not weathering it very well at all no no we're not i i must admit that a year and a

01:20:31.260 bit ago when it all began um i always gave up politics for lent so i had to be careful what

01:20:36.860 i was saying up until basically easter tide but when when easter came i i started to kind of weigh

01:20:42.700 into this and i did i did argue from from a kind of right-wing populist perspective that that maybe

01:20:48.500 this was an opportunity for things to change for the better i would hope uh whether we had you know

01:20:54.320 finally talk about some things around universal basic income or you know trying to roll the child

01:20:58.940 benefit and welfare and everything else into a single kind of payment and not and not have

01:21:03.020 tons and tons and tons of different government departments doing the same thing for that matter

01:21:06.680 i made the point that for you know for those of us who enjoy the road and aren't trying to drive

01:21:10.720 dangerous. They were just trying to enjoy the fact that we have eight cylinders. It was nice

01:21:15.160 not having any cops on the road. That was wonderful. It turns out the Motor Vehicle Act was mostly

01:21:19.300 harassment because there was no increase in deaths, not significantly so, when there were no cops on

01:21:24.800 the road for those two, three, four weeks. But the bigger thing is that, to your point, it is a

01:21:30.240 perfect storm. And instead of that perfect storm adding to some kind of renewal, this has been my

01:21:35.820 kind of observation ever since basically since the start of this show over the last couple of

01:21:40.980 weeks here just just about two months now it has been that that the 21st century what makes the

01:21:47.920 21st century different than the previous centuries and even modern history is that the crises don't

01:21:54.920 make things better so 2001 we have the September 11th attacks that doesn't result in terrorism

01:22:00.860 being solved forever or some kind of great rebuilding of of of western strength versus

01:22:06.380 versus you know uh certainly agitation by other powers instead we're all still shuffling through

01:22:12.700 airports without our shoes on and the same thing is true of 2008 2008 didn't create a better

01:22:18.460 fundamental financial system we're 10 we're 10 years out from it well 13 now but we're more than

01:22:23.340 10 years out almost 15 years out and our interest rates are at the rate that they they were in the

01:22:28.700 states to cause the last crisis so that we didn't learn our lesson there and then finally with covid

01:22:34.300 it's the same thing i mean the chicago fire you know the great london fire these these made changes

01:22:40.460 but is covid going to make a positive change is it going to invert the system is it going to reset

01:22:45.580 the table so that those who had been previously disadvantaged are going to be more advantaged

01:22:50.220 this time around i don't think so i think there's been a big wealth transfer and i think canada has

01:22:55.660 has especially been more punitive than some other jurisdictions to small businesses

01:23:00.380 i i don't think we're weathering it well i think it's almost the understatement of the year it's

01:23:04.940 it is almost actively persecuting and and denigrating uh the least of these uh and

01:23:10.460 those who are better off are doing much better well one observation because you know i'm

01:23:18.780 fascinated by history i read a lot of it you know there's a lot of things i've seen from myself but

01:23:25.100 humans have a great ability to fall back in the ruts you know it took you know for example in

01:23:32.060 six months after 9 11 before you know the american left started to behave in its old

01:23:38.540 fashion and then again everyone else fell back into the rots as they often do yeah the ability

01:23:45.260 for us to reinvent ourselves or to come up with a new dynamic if we interpret what has gone on

01:23:52.300 under covid it's going to be crushed you know the people will be instead clinging to what they knew

01:23:58.940 even though the economy and society is handcapped in many ways by this epidemic

01:24:06.780 and you know there will be the strong you know desire for uh an appearance of normality

01:24:14.220 you know which is to say what people remember and they will go right back to it

01:24:18.060 but uh on the other hand i mean there are signs of a reinvention i mean you're starting to see now

01:24:27.740 you know even american liberals are realizing that you know canceled culture and and the woke

01:24:33.340 are insane i mean there there is a point about post-modernism i mean uh the trump presidency

01:24:42.060 was in some respects i mean trump wasn't a post-modernist or he wasn't deliberately i'd

01:24:47.340 don't ever think he thought that far but he he realized that there was some unsettled atmosphere

01:24:55.180 and he could jump out in front of that crowd and lead it um i think that's the other point

01:25:01.340 is that uh if you look at really weird ideologies historically they all fail after a while they

01:25:08.540 collapse you know post-modernism and everything that's fallen from it is going to come apart

01:25:14.620 in the next 10 years um you know some of the examples here you look at um i mean my favorite

01:25:22.940 moment the french revolution robespierre is finally you know he's out flying every other

01:25:28.460 party that's come along sent them all to the guillotine and he's running things and now he can

01:25:33.980 re-orchestrate and rebuild france his way i mean he's so excited he probably had to change his

01:25:39.660 underpants every half hour and he organizes you know the festival of the supreme being in paris

01:25:46.060 and he goes on because he really wanted to go after the church among if you recall that among

01:25:50.940 other things so yeah finally going on about you know the worship of reason and you know the new

01:25:57.180 society that he's building problem is um one of the characteristics of the french revolution was

01:26:05.900 crop failures food shortage people were nervous about food and there were

01:26:11.340 and all these political scientists everyone who keeps looking at altering crisis they forget about

01:26:16.380 it every time but higher food prices and the fear of hunger is the most destabilizing thing there is

01:26:24.860 in the history of politics and he still hasn't solved that problem so suddenly he had the the

01:26:30.460 french you know well the the paris mob heckling him in the middle of his speech for three months

01:26:37.180 later he was decapitated you know the russians if you look under stalin's time i mean death of

01:26:44.460 stalin is a black comedy but in some ways it's a very very accurate movie but the weirdness the

01:26:51.420 whole artificial reason that associated with stalin notice the russians never went back to it

01:26:58.460 when he was gone they abandoned it and as soon as you had a leadership cast that wasn't personally

01:27:04.480 involved in mass murder and the salons error under you know under gorbachev the whole thing

01:27:09.480 collapsed you know ideologies go and this one is about running its course

01:27:15.120 and and we can only hope and pray for that day to arrive sooner rather than later

01:27:22.680 Yeah, because it's still going to do a lot of damage.

01:27:26.380 What then, again, kind of maybe pivoting into what is it then that conservatives need to do to try and, well, both assist the end of that and reinvigorate our own ideas?

01:27:38.660 It's been an ongoing debate.

01:27:41.360 Conservatives have debated whether to pull away from society or to better integrate with it.

01:27:46.280 conservatives have argued whether or not they should simply you know use various tactics some

01:27:52.200 of them quite machiavellian to get into power and then defund the things they don't like and

01:27:56.800 just hold on and wait and weather the storm of opposition but hopefully everything kind of

01:28:02.380 expires at the end of their term and nothing can be re-implemented i'm thinking of the census

01:28:07.000 under harper in that case he he almost made it if he'd gotten into 2016 there would have been just

01:28:12.800 too much lost information the long-form census would have been useless but it's but here we are

01:28:19.760 you know here we are and and conservatives just don't know what to do on a religious side on a

01:28:24.800 fiscal side on a practical side on a social side or cultural side what is it they're supposed to

01:28:29.760 do in order to help resist what what is here and build something that is new and reinvigorate our

01:28:35.200 country in some respects remember that every intellectual movement that comes along and

01:28:42.640 that's certainly true for conservatives is also in some respects guided by circumstances um you

01:28:49.680 know for example the the whole idea of defunding you know wokeism and and political correctness

01:28:56.720 uh i think that's going to come around and it's not because of any sinister machination or plot

01:29:02.640 but let's face it i mean our economy is about shock everyone is covering so much debt

01:29:08.720 that sometime in the next 10 years we are going to be under such an austerity regime

01:29:15.680 that nobody's i mean we're going to be stripping out of the extras out of a lot of things including

01:29:22.000 our schools universities you know we'll probably in five years maybe even sooner you know we'll

01:29:28.080 be turning to every uh university president in canada going you know business engineering hard

01:29:35.680 science everything else out the window and if you try and you know sneak in extra jobs

01:29:41.920 uh sort of extra classes for someone who's teaching critical race theory we're going to

01:29:46.800 cut your funding uh by that amount get it that's going to happen yeah because it has to um you know

01:29:57.040 if we try and plan for what's going to occur i mean reality is going to gobsmack us in the way

01:30:02.880 that reality always has so i mean for conservatives what they really need to be doing is sticking to

01:30:09.600 their beliefs and actually re-examining what their beliefs are what really defines a conservative

01:30:16.080 and to continue to be conservatives you know and then the future will present us with our

01:30:23.120 opportunities as it comes up one of those opportunities will be the federal election

01:30:30.720 the federal election is probably going to happen this fall there's some people are still betting

01:30:35.760 on this summer i'm still leaning towards fall what what do you think is going to happen in the

01:30:41.280 federal election what's what's on what's on the line what are the stakes and who's going to win

01:30:46.480 Oh, I really do wish I had a magic crystal ball. I'd like to imagine that, you know,

01:30:58.000 we're going to be a conservative minority, or maybe even a conservative majority government,

01:31:03.360 but, you know, I'm not entirely pleased with everybody who's at the helm there. The other

01:31:11.040 point is that we're going to see i mean and stewart has mentioned this you know widespread spread

01:31:18.560 rebellion as it were you know new ideas i mean the results in northern bc are going to be something

01:31:26.320 else um the ndp has become almost irrelevant um and and it's going to be worse but will that

01:31:34.480 translate into again a narrow squeak for the liberals that they'll be able to continue

01:31:41.040 Who knows?

01:31:44.860 I think the writing is there that even liberals

01:31:48.040 have started to realize that Justin Trudeau is a dead weight,

01:31:52.400 that they have lost their former position.

01:31:56.100 They have lost who they were.

01:31:59.800 I mean, the kindest thing you can do to the federal liberals

01:32:02.460 is to banish them to the wilderness

01:32:04.740 so that they too can look at themselves

01:32:07.980 and recover their former principles,

01:32:10.220 recover part of their history i mean it's just it is a party that's desperate need of reinventing

01:32:17.660 itself and getting rid of the uh sock prints and the the courtiers he's brought with him

01:32:25.100 um as to you know who replaces the mdp because again they they've become so hopelessly obsolete

01:32:31.900 who knows maybe the green party will pick up something but again they have to really straighten

01:32:38.460 themselves out i mean that's this is too many variables right now it is a real deficit in

01:32:44.500 leadership and uh it's it's funny too because there were i'm thinking of particularly when

01:32:50.000 it comes to ford and kenny even even pallister uh the saskatchewanians i know they're not happy

01:32:56.900 with what's happening in saskatchewan but also it's saskatchewans and nobody really cares what

01:33:00.920 scott moe is doing no offense saskatchewanians love you all i've got family there i was born

01:33:06.240 there. But Scott Moe is not really coming up on anybody's radar. No offense to anybody.

01:33:10.960 But the point is that what kind of hits me is that even

01:33:14.320 with Pallister and Kenny and Ford, you have these

01:33:18.040 and for that matter, Legault in Quebec, you had these kind of populist

01:33:22.520 sort of movements sort of rise. Legault sort of center-right

01:33:26.440 sort of guy. Ford doing kind of a Trumpian sort of thing.

01:33:30.260 Kenny restoring conservatism in Alberta and Pallister going to the polls early

01:33:34.280 in order to regain his majority all of them appear to be out of sorts with their own base

01:33:40.520 their base doesn't seem to be very happy with them uh and and what are you going to do with that

01:33:46.120 what what what like how how could people who who had been seen as kind of the restorers right i

01:33:51.960 mean palliser's government was the first conservative government in a while ford banished

01:33:55.440 the liberals to the absolute wilderness kenny got rid of the ndp like these people were savior

01:34:00.180 figures they were messiahs and now with covid it looks like they look like absolute devils ruling

01:34:07.140 the roost and it's not working well it's also partly you know blame transfer let's face it i

01:34:13.140 mean the real failures of our covid response all began with the federal government uh you know that

01:34:20.740 didn't get the materials it needed that kept canada open they kept bringing in new infected

01:34:27.060 cases and also let's face it canadians don't like someone who plays against the system who takes

01:34:33.300 advantage of the personal facts i mean trudeau appears to have left the country twice in in the

01:34:40.420 last six months you know for a vacation in the sunny south and then quietly come back in on the

01:34:47.060 government jet and almost no one pays attention but that's out there that's documented and that's

01:34:54.420 the sort of thing that canadians might really react against i think actually the more i think

01:35:00.420 about it though there is one point the liberals are not a national party they aren't i mean they

01:35:06.500 are the laurentide triangle and some stuff from the maritimes and then there's a pocket of them

01:35:14.900 you know they've been shut out of the rest of the country the only national party we really have

01:35:20.580 is the conservatives that is the only party that's got a presence from coast to coast except it's

01:35:26.820 again locked out of the major cities and is everywhere else so there is that at least but

01:35:34.500 yeah um so many of the conservative provincial leaders have been hit badly with in the in the

01:35:42.180 crisis i mean kenny has been trying to you know weather an impossible situation let go same thing

01:35:48.980 you know i've got uh my brother's family south of montreal i've got uh um my oldest nephew's

01:35:57.780 wife is a doctor and his youngest nephew is a nurse who's become probate positive you know

01:36:05.780 i get it from them a position of you know what it's like in the front line and

01:36:09.540 they're being a little smart and it's not the the failure of the uh lego it's the result was

01:36:19.140 the the failure of quebecois take the threat seriously in alberta we've just got too many

01:36:26.260 weird ideologies around that are reacting to things and bubbling up and i don't know if kenny

01:36:32.020 can actually uh recapture the uh the authority he used to have but problem is again the internet

01:36:39.620 there's just you know you got some weird idea and pretty soon you have a following

01:36:46.020 yeah i i mean uh i have some weird ideas and uh i'm on this platform so uh

01:36:53.540 yeah i mean i'm the same way if you asked me to actually exactly spell out my politics it would

01:37:00.420 probably be a party platform that would be utterly unelectable yeah i mean mine too mine too uh which

01:37:08.020 is why i i just when people ask me what i am or where i'm at with things i'm like i'm just waiting

01:37:12.980 for duplacis to come back that's where i draw my political lines i'm i'm an ultra montane and uh

01:37:18.500 that that was better it was better than what we have now anyways but populist fiscal conservative

01:37:25.060 with the churchillian gestalt explain that please yeah i like that i like that i have several of his

01:37:31.380 books on my wall i've read i've read through his both his english-speaking peoples and his second

01:37:35.780 world war beautiful books it's uh i guess as we kind of wind down here john it it looks pretty

01:37:44.420 bleak out there for a lot of conservatives uh and for anybody kind of who who is freedom loving and

01:37:50.420 you don't have to be a conservative conservative to believe to be freedom loving but anybody who

01:37:54.640 would like to have just a bit more independence or think that maybe i don't need to call the

01:37:59.300 government every time i do something or dig a hole or put in a toilet or fix a light bulb or go

01:38:05.340 outside and put a mask on whatever it is like that the idea that i need permission from the

01:38:09.720 nanny state to do anything now especially in covet is starting to wear on people the very small group

01:38:16.040 who really like the rules and the restrictions and then there's kind of everybody else what does

01:38:20.760 everybody else have to do either to try and take some of that power back or at least celebrate what

01:38:25.560 they have and and kind of re-establish that culture of of independence and and and let their let their

01:38:32.520 independent flag fly let let pervade that into the culture um in their own quiet canadian way

01:38:41.880 rebel that doesn't mean turn up the provincial legislature with sharpen agricultural instruments

01:38:47.320 and torches and buckets of hot tar but basically stick a middle finger up and go f you i'm not

01:38:55.960 um to remember let's say like if c10 passes remember you know who is trying to create prop

01:39:02.360 can so that they can control information to canadians indefinitely so to remember who you

01:39:09.720 are to stick to your values now the problem is you know it's um with the internet there's all

01:39:18.360 sorts of weird people out there trying to create their own party but uh the one thing that people

01:39:24.840 have to do is is you cannot get perfection out of a political leader it's not going to happen

01:39:31.480 so i mean stick with the least evil as far as you're concerned you know go with whoever you

01:39:38.040 think is more likely to do a good job for you and right now that looks like the conservatives

01:39:44.360 the other thing is you know stuart parker has articulated on your program um is that there is

01:39:50.760 some sort of new reinvention that's coming i mean what he i think is describing in british columbia

01:39:57.720 is urban suburban that's very rural suburban revolt against the urban elite uh and again

01:40:06.920 may see that in large parts of the country now that tends to normally uh translate into votes

01:40:13.320 for conservatives uh and i i think we're more likely to see that but uh again who knows you

01:40:22.360 you may have some new party that actually have is stuart talked about has a fusion of all sorts of

01:40:27.720 beliefs one bubbling up but that won't come overnight and an election this year i mean it's

01:40:34.760 too late for it to appear now. I remember with the Reform Party, it was basically an association

01:40:43.700 until they got to 100,000 members and then they sprung it on everybody that they were going to

01:40:47.860 become a political party now. And most people kind of stopped for a moment were like, well,

01:40:51.960 I'm okay with this. Is that the only method left to kind of trick people, but invite them into a

01:40:59.820 discussion and uh bring them into a club and eventually one day they realize that there's a

01:41:05.020 uniform and a flag and a little book that explains what they believe and off they go to to march on

01:41:09.900 ottawa in in popular non-violent form well um time was i was a reformer yeah except i was a reformer

01:41:20.000 in ontario desperate you know remember you know the west wants in and then we were ontario reformers

01:41:27.040 were basically talking to Calgary going we want in you know we want what you

01:41:31.220 have you know the rest is some degree of political history but yeah we'll

01:41:39.400 muddle through somehow our opposition will be known I mean the idea of some

01:41:45.660 sort of fascist or you know and when I mean fascist left-wing just as likely as

01:41:53.220 in fact more likely than right wing um appearance in canada no i mean at heart most of us are too

01:42:01.940 independent for that most of us at some level can't really stand being told what to do or to

01:42:08.580 think and the liberals have forgotten that um and hopefully everyone else will remember but canadians

01:42:16.740 have i mean it's it's one aspect of our politics in the last 40 years look at the the number of

01:42:25.300 people who've actually voted very few do but if the public wakes up if they're doing the canadian

01:42:34.340 equivalent of turning up with sharp agricultural instruments and torches they might start voting

01:42:39.620 again and the results will be quite revolutionary they really could be i one of the fun things i

01:42:46.820 got to do almost a year ago exactly now i was already up in churchill i was only getting to

01:42:51.460 send in a column maybe once i tried to do once a week but i was very busy up there so it really

01:42:55.460 turned into about once every two weeks sometimes it got as low as once a month but uh i remember

01:43:00.580 turning in this column and thinking i i didn't think it would get published but it got published

01:43:04.420 um uh so i was dismissed right after the january riots of this year so it's funny that this

01:43:09.540 prediction kind of correlated i wrote for canada day this kind of sort of in the mode of gk

01:43:15.140 chestnut in a sort of fantastical sort of imagination of of canadians marching on ottawa

01:43:21.140 non-violently but but seizing their members of parliament and dragging them all to to parliament

01:43:26.820 as as we drag the speaker now but dragging them all uh in that same kind of spirit or compelling

01:43:32.580 them to come and and just forcing them to do their jobs just forcing them to actually lead the

01:43:40.320 country and i think kind of the the line from there was you know people people who have a right

01:43:45.640 to their rulers and elected people people who elect their rulers have a right to to elected

01:43:50.280 representation and that i think has been kind of the most damning thing through covid i understand

01:43:55.680 people are doing zoom meetings and everything else but in the end i mean the people's house

01:43:59.380 the people's house and i think i think it feels like there's just been a complete abdication of

01:44:04.660 leadership provincially federally and even municipally people feel leaderless they feel

01:44:09.700 completely lost and they don't like the narratives that are coming out from their leaders they don't

01:44:13.700 believe them anymore it is a huge vacuum and people are very frustrated on the other hand i

01:44:20.660 i mean uh uh pierre paul i've never pronounced his last name but the uh you know the conservatives

01:44:29.620 have some stars in parliament where the liberal bench has failed to entrance anybody um i mean

01:44:37.620 there are leaders out there but uh i'm sort of fondly remembering uh if you remember your history

01:44:44.100 the roman republic what was the original title for the senators

01:44:50.660 oh no that's fathers that's right yeah yeah in other words they weren't sitting there as

01:44:58.820 entitled as they were in the late roman republic or you know complete drones they were in the empire

01:45:05.220 um in the early roman republic they were people who basically went you know you it's your turn

01:45:12.020 get there start voting start working now you know if you look at the history of ancient athens

01:45:19.220 you know that conscription of people for office for politics was again quite common

01:45:28.900 and that aspect hasn't really gone far far away you know the classic canadian that i referred to

01:45:35.460 originally it was again very egalitarian and didn't like anyone presenting errors and attitudes

01:45:41.620 towards him and that that part of it is still there uh and again we respect people who show

01:45:48.580 you know what they can do you know trudeau is prime minister because of who his father was

01:45:54.820 but again he's browning off a lot of canadians because he's not doing the job you know i don't 0.74

01:46:01.380 think there's ever been anyone as much of an absentee prime minister as he has been

01:46:06.740 and that that aspect of Canadians is still there it'll reassert itself we'll

01:46:12.640 be looking again for quality people at some point very very soon and that'll be

01:46:19.340 a hard test can you do the job are you capable this is also one of the the

01:46:26.660 secrets is it's not generally understood about Harper but remember he had to be

01:46:31.580 dragoon into re-entering political life you know there was an effort actually to conscript him

01:46:39.100 uh in the late 1990s as both the leader of the of the alliance and then go on from there

01:46:45.420 and that's actually one of the things i liked about it most was you know he didn't have much

01:46:49.660 ego you know he still didn't at the very end of it all but i mean the thing that was quite

01:46:56.140 remarkable was he wasn't offering himself as a leader he was being arm twisted into it

01:47:01.580 and that's it may come up when someone finally writes a definitive biography about him maybe

01:47:08.780 that's the also the not him but somebody else is the ultimate prime minister we really want

01:47:14.940 is one who's actually dragooned into the job and doesn't actually want it

01:47:20.540 and you talked about chesterton i think my favorite uh novelist is terry pratchett i'm

01:47:27.900 not sure if you're familiar with them but if you look at one of the the constant themes in

01:47:32.620 terry pratchett novel is that power is best given to those who don't want to exercise it

01:47:38.220 you know and that's the idea we should be looking for

01:47:42.540 yes our own cincinnatus someone will lay it down after it's been given

01:47:47.660 hopefully we learn to do that before it's too late this is true um well yeah and the order of

01:47:54.060 of cincinnati is still a very much a going concern in the united states it's probably one of the

01:47:59.260 reasons why uh things have been i mean their military hasn't got too involved in politics

01:48:05.980 but of course there's another aspect of the canadian identity that's also uh not even

01:48:10.940 discussed that much but let's face it it's a key part of our identity as well is that we're also

01:48:16.780 you know the monarchy and you know one of the things we admire the most about you know members

01:48:22.620 the royal family is that they actually do the work you know they they come they're not posing

01:48:29.020 they're not ornamental um and that's one of the things that's again uh in the military if you

01:48:34.860 serve for long enough you're going to meet members of the royal family that's one of the things that's 0.99

01:48:38.700 most appreciated about them the other thing is you know some of the idiots out there are talking 1.00

01:48:44.140 about you know canada becoming a republic and i can't think of any more senseless notion than that 0.99

01:48:50.380 but you know north america already has two republics what do we need a third one for

01:48:58.300 i'm a monarchist myself uh one of the things that's kind of interesting being on this platform

01:49:02.620 being with the western standard obviously as a strong sovereignty streak especially through

01:49:07.180 the albertans that we have in our uh uh in our you know in our midst and that's fine but i i

01:49:14.460 i've always been a monarchist and i think i always will be and if there's one thing that does kind

01:49:18.300 kind of mark the difference between the more libertarian streak and the more conserved streak

01:49:22.220 is definitely that attachment to monarchy the libertarians can take it or leave it or quickly

01:49:26.260 dismiss it as quickly as the marxists did uh and and this and the bolsheviks did with the czars

01:49:31.660 but for me i think that there's something worth preserving and having a model

01:49:35.900 family unit is probably better than just having a model president well exactly i think the other

01:49:43.440 point is i mean if you really go down the united states it's always fun to freak them out you know

01:49:49.840 you talk about you know the americans talk about our navy and our air force and we'd go

01:49:54.560 oh royal canadian navy royal canadian air force uh you know my old regiment the queen's york rangers

01:50:02.000 you know the royal canadian regiment you know princess louise and so on and so forth and look

01:50:09.920 at harper i mean i think one of the things he really regrets is not getting around and read

01:50:14.000 renaming canada post back to the royal mail he probably would have he would have i think

01:50:20.080 if he had time to do that but it's to remember some of these connections because they do make

01:50:25.280 us very very distinct uh and and they make us different and again it's it's part of our heritage

01:50:33.920 god knows the number of first nations that like to consider that they actually have a special 0.99

01:50:39.040 relationship with the british crown and treasure it because god knows i can't trust ottawa and

01:50:46.160 they're not that keen on our provincial government either no no that's a another part of our heritage

01:50:54.400 that again we we discard at our peril you know we've got to actually keep that going

01:51:01.600 although god knows what will happen again when the queen goes but uh yeah anyway there's been

01:51:08.320 weak monarchs before there there has been there has been we're currently living with a weak dolphin

01:51:16.560 what are we going to do uh thank you so much for coming on today john uh you've you've brightened

01:51:22.480 my spirits you've helped me uh believe that there is hope out there even in this bleak time i'm i'm

01:51:27.600 hopeful that you will return to us we'd like to have you as a regular contributor perhaps perhaps

01:51:32.960 if once a month or once every couple of weeks works for you it'd be really good to have you

01:51:37.600 to just give us that perspective both that where conservative conservatism has been in canada

01:51:42.880 where it is right now where it's going where the cultural trends are headed and

01:51:47.200 what kind of potential there is there for for real rigorous thought around these questions

01:51:53.040 well let come on board and i said i've been watching your show ever since

01:51:58.320 well to be perfectly honest i was you were interviewing stewart parker and i went oh

01:52:03.360 him i haven't listened to anything stuart has had to say for a while you know i had to mention the

01:52:10.080 fact that he you know promoted himself uh promoted me to you as well but you know again uh just one

01:52:17.920 way of clearing up a mystery that uh you know stuart and i are very different very many different

01:52:22.320 ways but we both respect each other a lot and that's it's always given me an example that to

01:52:27.840 sort of right the left yeah it can come together where two honest people are yes much can be built

01:52:34.400 from that and that's been the key with this platform again uh you know to all of our viewers

01:52:40.000 and everything else uh we we put up ideas here that may be popular may not be popular but we

01:52:44.560 talk to everybody and we try to reach across the aisle that's what we've been doing here from day

01:52:48.080 one we're going to keep doing it until i guess they cancel me or something i have no idea uh

01:52:52.720 but we're that's that's the policy we follow here so again thank you so much for being on with us

01:52:56.960 john and uh we wish you all the best we'll see you again soon all right thanks very much

01:53:04.320 i was speaking with uh john c thompson about uh well then everything canadian and what's going on

01:53:10.080 in canada right now particularly when it comes to conservatism post-modernism the lack of there

01:53:14.800 being any think tanks in this country of note and uh where we're headed from here and uh hopefully

01:53:20.640 where where things can change uh we've got just a couple of minutes left and it's it's important i

01:53:26.880 think to kind of re-emphasize again this most recent uh thing that's come up in british columbia

01:53:32.160 and i some of this crosses over to what we were talking about with john i bring up my email uh as

01:53:37.280 always we want people to like to subscribe to comment and to send us any suggestions for the

01:53:42.640 show it's very important uh that we continue to work with people uh on the show and and with our

01:53:49.120 our viewers and to know exactly what people are wanting to see and what's working and what isn't

01:53:54.160 working. I got a note the other day that was kind of reassuring. I've kind of been iffy about

01:53:59.380 doing the ranting thing a bit and, you know, does it make sense? Is it too broken up? Is there too

01:54:05.040 many pauses or ums or ahs in it? You know, it's not perfectly scripted. I don't have a teleprompter

01:54:10.120 here. I'm thinking about getting one for doing some other kind of parts of this project, but

01:54:14.700 love teleprompters. I've viewed them before, but we don't, we don't, we don't have it right now.

01:54:19.640 The point is that I asked about this and somebody did send me a note, just reassuring me that,

01:54:24.480 you know what? No, like it's important to have this, uh, this monologue aspect. It's important

01:54:28.900 to have that opening statement to do kind of the, the Fox news, Tucker Carlson Hannity thing,

01:54:33.680 where there's an opening statement and you just say something and then maybe even carry on with

01:54:38.180 that for a little while. And then you can bring the guests on and start, start working through

01:54:41.500 that stuff. So that's what we're doing right now. Not constantly, but we at least have the opening

01:54:46.780 statement. And on days where we just can't get a guest in any earlier than 930, I guess I just

01:54:52.720 got to roll with it. Again, please be suggesting guests. I'm just kind of seeing that I'm trying to

01:54:58.200 I'm going to try and do this again. Does this work? No, I'm going the wrong way. I'm going the

01:55:01.900 wrong way. My producer is going to kill me. Okay, here we go. We'll do this. Look at that. There's 0.99

01:55:05.680 the email. There we go. Yeah, there we go. I'm just like, I'm, you know, I would like to buy a

01:55:11.080 Q anyway. So two Qs. No, I'm just kidding. Uh, it's, it's, it's funny, right? You're moving on

01:55:18.540 camera and you got to be trained how to do that. Um, yeah, Ryan, that's, I didn't realize that

01:55:23.180 wanting, uh, freedom was a crazy ideology. Well, that's, that's, you know, that's the thing. That's

01:55:28.520 where we live now. Uh, that's where we live now. Thank you, Pamela. That's, that's very kind of

01:55:33.620 you um that's where we live now though that's it we live in a time where uh believing that you might

01:55:40.740 have a right to your own your own thoughts let alone your own body let alone uh your own space

01:55:47.080 without the government interfering with it and it really is incredible right the government is in

01:55:51.000 your toilet water it's it's in your lawn there's a community covenant around your lawn whether or

01:55:56.140 not you can even park your rv in your driveway like they're everywhere they're everywhere and

01:56:02.120 it's kind of incredible can you do your own roof without buying a permit i think a decent amount of

01:56:06.520 people do uh but technically speaking they could enforce that anytime like this this has to stop

01:56:12.440 it has to stop i am no one's idea of a libertarian i am a tory i am a conservative i don't just mean

01:56:18.300 even federally i just mean as as a philosophical kind of understanding i'm a conservative and if

01:56:22.780 you really press me i end up in a traditionalist very very kind of you know very strongly roman

01:56:29.140 catholic sort of understanding around these questions um i'd probably fit into duplices

01:56:33.720 quebec just fine but the point is except for the part where i can't speak frank but the point is

01:56:38.300 that i you know i i have these strong beliefs and that sort of thing but nonetheless like as a kind

01:56:43.320 of general idea like here we are and the government's everywhere and and as we were talking

01:56:49.300 with john they are they're everywhere and that enforcement is everywhere there's a lot of

01:56:54.360 restriction right now, quite literally with COVID, right? We all know that. And yet at the same time,

01:56:59.220 they're taking more and more representation away. That's what's going to happen in BC here. We're

01:57:04.040 going to redraw the boundaries up here. So somehow I'm going to have less of a voice and more work

01:57:08.120 to do. This has been going on for years. It's been happening in our workplaces. Well, there's

01:57:13.420 cuts, cuts, cuts. There's more managers are being paid egregious amounts of money. Not enough

01:57:17.560 frontline people, but my tasks go up. Then my phone rings at night and they tell me things.

01:57:22.840 and they send me emails after hours and where's my 40-hour work week. This has to stop. This has

01:57:29.120 to stop. The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. And so the fact of the matter is, 0.90

01:57:34.320 is that we have to, we have to assert ourselves and we have got to start bringing back not just

01:57:39.980 our fundamental freedoms, but that fundamental humanity, which is that, you know what, leisure

01:57:43.980 is valuable. People need to have time with their family, their friends. They need to pursue their

01:57:49.700 own hobbies that's the the stuff of life that actually makes civilization worth living and

01:57:53.960 having and hopefully we pursue that and i think today uh john kind of pointed some things out to

01:58:00.240 us there like history we should be more familiar with and ideas we should be more familiar with

01:58:05.620 so i'm not saying pick up all the books i'm just saying reinvest in that reinvest in the values

01:58:12.560 that made our civilization once you know once great and could make us great again and uh we'll

01:58:18.080 save this country from the really dismal path it's currently on. I have faith in you. I hope

01:58:24.200 you have faith in me. Again, send me any questions, comments, concerns you can. Like and share this

01:58:31.080 video. Do take out a subscription at the Western Standard if you can. And finally, don't forget,

01:58:36.180 we'll be on again tomorrow at 9 a.m. Pacific, 10 a.m. Mountain. We're going to start with Aaron

01:58:40.760 Gunn in the first half because we didn't want to confuse you because we don't have Aaron Eckman

01:58:45.020 this week so we have Aaron Gunn instead

01:58:46.560 slightly different perspective and

01:58:49.060 then in the second half we'll have

01:58:51.060 Stuart on as we usually do to brick us

01:58:53.160 and to tell us everything

01:58:54.960 that's going on in the world from his perspective

01:58:56.960 he'll be there in the second half that'll be

01:58:59.100 Mountain Standard time tomorrow

01:59:00.580 with me your host Nathan Gita thanks so much for

01:59:03.120 watching

01:59:15.020 You

Western Standard - May 13, 2021

Mountain Standard Time - May 12, 2021

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