Western Standard - Mountain Standard Time - May 13 2021

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00:01:00.000 Transcription by CastingWords

00:01:30.000 Thank you.

00:02:00.000 good morning and welcome to mountain standard time i'm your host nathan guida and today i'll

00:02:26.560 be speaking with Aaron Gunn, independent journalist, and of course an agitator in general

00:02:31.420 down in Victoria and throughout British Columbia, who goes and investigates what's really behind

00:02:36.300 the stories. And then a little later today, joining us physically in studio, actually,

00:02:40.560 will be Stuart Parker to kind of round out our week and help us see both near and far what

00:02:44.900 happened in the news. As always, I recommend that you subscribe to us on Facebook as well

00:02:51.900 is YouTube. And finally, of course, take out a subscription at the Western Standard. We don't

00:02:57.380 get a big check from the Liberals regarding our journalism, so if you'd like to support

00:03:02.660 independent journalism, please feel free to send us some cash. Big news out of Alberta this morning.

00:03:08.660 Members of the United Conservative Party Caucus are actively calling for Premier Jason Kenney's

00:03:13.280 resignation. If you'd like to learn more about that story in detail, log on to the Western

00:03:18.140 Standards website. We'll have live updates throughout the day as this drama unfolds.

00:03:23.700 For what it's worth, I predict that Mr. Kenney will not survive this, well, I'd say it's more

00:03:29.980 like an insurrection within his caucus, a rebellion, but you could also call it a coup.

00:03:34.860 I must admit Premier Kenney's situation saddens me. As previously mentioned, I interned with him

00:03:41.520 in Ottawa many moons ago while doing the Laurentian leadership program through my alma mater,

00:03:46.360 Trinity Western University. The man I knew then was intelligent, good-humored, and generous,

00:03:52.260 even to us lowly office serfs. I remember him actually pushing a cart around on Fridays after

00:03:57.680 quitting time, to be clear, and all the things he'd been given as gifts that were liquid and

00:04:02.340 fermented or distilled would be poured out in small drams, and everybody would have their choice

00:04:07.480 of stuff that was, you know, $300 bottles and $10 bottles, whatever they were, and everybody would

00:04:12.920 have just a small drink at the end of the week, and he would pour them himself, and he would chat

00:04:17.580 with each one of us individually. That was pretty special. And I really believed at that time he'd

00:04:23.320 be Prime Minister someday soon, that he would succeed Harper. It was an incredible achievement,

00:04:28.780 his uniting the right in Alberta, and going on to win a majority. Even Harper had to suffer

00:04:33.560 minority parliaments first. But as fate would have it, Kenney was elected in 2019, with Alberta still

00:04:38.940 suffering from the oil crash five years earlier, as well as COVID-19 looming on the horizon.

00:04:45.080 It's always darkest just before the dawn, they say. But throughout 2020 and now into 2021,

00:04:50.660 challenges only got darker for Alberta, for the rest of Canada, for all the world.

00:04:55.360 Add to this that Kenny seems attached to staff that are giving him bad advice or taking trips

00:04:59.440 in the middle of a pandemic, while also imposing some of the harshest lockdowns on the province

00:05:03.780 best known for an independent spirit, like its sister Quebec, but we'll get into that another

00:05:07.560 time, and suddenly old Jason looks pretty vulnerable. It is said that the Premier actually

00:05:13.360 admitted he wanted a new base. That's probably a sign it's time to go. There is only one cardinal

00:05:19.580 rule in politics, particularly if you don't want to be like those craven, sick operatives that we 0.98

00:05:24.140 call the Liberal Party of Canada. Never betray the base. The Grits don't really have a base. They have 0.97

00:05:29.940 a consensus, but they trick other groups into voting for them, and then they betray those

00:05:34.000 situational allies all the time veterans first nations unwed mothers it doesn't matter who they

00:05:40.420 are they they will trick them into voting for them and then leave them on the stoop like nothing else

00:05:44.680 if you want politics done differently never ever act like that in alberta kenny was elected by

00:05:50.420 people who were sick and tired of the pcs entitled culture that is to say the progressive

00:05:54.500 conservatives beforehand and rachel notley's ndp spending tax heights and soft socialism and of

00:06:00.100 course, her pivot to big oil. She left behind little oil and she went to big oil. Even as the 0.91

00:06:05.100 pandemic was starting out, Premier Kenney needed to think through his own political survival,

00:06:09.780 which meant he could not treat Albertans in a way that they would not accept. Today,

00:06:13.520 he is reaping those fruits. The best path forward was to make recommendations, beef up protocols for

00:06:19.360 hospitals as well as old folks' homes, and pray that everything worked out. If Kenney had followed

00:06:24.000 those rubrics, for all the heat he would have caught from his fellow premiers and the feds,

00:06:27.580 maybe the world, he would have survived

00:06:29.660 in his role and perhaps even proved that lockdowns

00:06:31.820 were ineffective. He'd be

00:06:33.600 in line to be the next PM, especially

00:06:35.400 considering that Aaron seems to be fumbling that away.

00:06:38.040 But it wasn't a B. We'll

00:06:39.600 leave that topic now and we'll pivot back to

00:06:41.500 BC issues, but I'm genuinely sorry for Mr.

00:06:43.640 Kenny's predicament. God help you,

00:06:45.740 Mr. Premier. Miss you, Kenny.

00:06:47.620 Sorry. Sorry about that.

00:06:49.380 Well, we've got Aaron waiting in the wings here.

00:06:51.420 We're going to bring him on right away and we're

00:06:53.420 just so thankful to have him. Of course, it's Aaron

00:06:55.560 Gunn live to us from, I suspect,

00:06:57.380 victoria uh but uh just uh why don't you tell us what's happening down in the lower mainland

00:07:02.580 victoria bc and what's gone wrong with the world aaron uh would be a shorter answer maybe to tell

00:07:08.680 you what's going right with the world seems like uh these days there's uh yeah there's one issue

00:07:14.480 after another i mean you know every day they're tearing down a new statue another industry is

00:07:18.740 getting sabotaged people are losing their jobs people are people are losing their businesses

00:07:23.780 and uh you know we just keep racking all these problems up on the nation's credit card and that

00:07:30.000 bill is going to come due one day and it's going to be a big one let's let's start from from kind

00:07:35.140 of the local area move our way out right now on the island i mean one there was of course there's

00:07:40.240 the homeless situation in victoria i know that you talk about this a lot on social media and and

00:07:44.480 you discuss it a lot that clearly the city has lost control of the situation and there's no

00:07:48.660 leadership but not so far away either and we can talk about that in just a moment is what's going

00:07:52.780 on in Ferry Creek and the kind of bizarre intersectionalism in reverse that's happening

00:07:58.620 where First Nations people who want to make a living and are doing resource development

00:08:02.720 are now being countered by non-Native people who are protesting against their livelihood.

00:08:08.720 So why don't we talk about some of those things? 0.70

00:08:11.300 Yeah, sure.

00:08:11.820 Where would you like to start?

00:08:14.380 Well, I mean, let's start from Victoria and work our way outwards.

00:08:17.120 I've always liked visiting Victoria in the sense that it's a very nice place to visit.

00:08:20.960 It's very pretty.

00:08:21.720 uh i did park once in a near somebody's residence uh you know in a parking zone but it wasn't

00:08:27.580 supposed to be overnight parking i couldn't go anywhere else and they had a traffic bobby called

00:08:31.760 on me but somehow i parking in the wrong zone that would get people called on me but somehow

00:08:36.840 being a a colonist of beacon hill park that that's fine so i should have parked there i guess

00:08:42.260 yeah no i mean i grew up in this city obviously still live in this city and it's amazing what's

00:08:48.300 happened to it they've uh they've turned you know what was once such a beautiful and pretty much

00:08:54.580 crime-free city into uh areas that are a complete disaster zone every day there's somebody else that

00:09:00.140 gets stabbed that's bleeding out in the middle of of uh one of the downtown streets as you alluded

00:09:05.500 to beacon hill park which is kind of our central park here in victoria is uh has been occupied it's

00:09:12.080 they recently um have moved them out there but there was a tent city there for about an entire

00:09:17.120 year uh where people were being stabbed there was i believe an axe murderer was taking shelter there

00:09:22.100 at some point um some of these stories almost defy uh uh defy belief but um you know now what

00:09:28.880 they're doing their latest thing is they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars in

00:09:31.880 taxpayers money and they're going to try to warehouse all these people um and think that

00:09:37.240 the problems are going to go away i don't know if the same things uh happening in some of these

00:09:41.260 other provinces but across bc right now the government's literally going up and just buying

00:09:45.220 up hotels i think they've spent about a billion dollars buying up hotels um both in victoria and

00:09:50.780 the lower mainland and they're just trying to wear the warehouse the problem there of drug

00:09:55.060 addiction mental illness and crime and uh they're going to turn these hotels into to just crime

00:10:00.560 hot spots that are going to uh to affect all the communities and the the tax-paying law-abiding

00:10:05.920 citizens that that live around them one of the things that people talk about all the time is

00:10:11.180 is gentrification and pushing people out but is this not whatever the opposite of gentrification

00:10:15.900 is is this not something that if people have a stake in their part of the city their part of

00:10:20.380 the country especially considering the cost of housing they just got into a house so they did

00:10:23.980 have to buy in a part of town that maybe wasn't as expensive as other parts and that's life and

00:10:28.220 that's fine there's nothing wrong with that you can you can make a good neighborhood out of it

00:10:31.820 but if suddenly uh the real estate values are going to change because of of moving people around

00:10:37.660 uh basically by coercion that that seems rather unfair to the average taxpayer to the person who

00:10:43.340 just made a capital investment in a very a very their lifelong investment the thing that's going

00:10:48.540 to carry them on the most well you're 100 correct and it's also i mean the parks in these neighborhoods

00:10:56.060 are being stolen from the people in the communities they're setting up signs here in victoria that

00:11:01.900 that are you know like almost have this feel-good uh imagery around them and it says like be careful

00:11:08.220 make sure to watch for needles before playing at the park as if that's the new reality and

00:11:12.940 that's the new status quo that families are just supposed to put up with as part of life which i

00:11:17.660 think is completely unacceptable um so you know you have people that they grew up in these communities

00:11:23.420 as you just mentioned made huge investments in housing in these communities and uh you know now

00:11:28.540 they can't take their their kids or grandkids to the park uh they can't feel safe walking home at

00:11:33.340 night um and they've had uh as you alluded to with their number one asset um take a massive hit

00:11:42.460 we had crisis has killed more people in british columbia than covet 19 has and yet of course all

00:11:47.660 we're talking about is covet 19 uh recently with the opiate crisis justice which is which is directly

00:11:53.580 connected with homelessness i mean there was also a tragedy in in your hometown there of ali thomas

00:11:58.460 dying of an overdose clearly from fentanyl and she was 12 what what is going on here like why

00:12:05.740 can't our government get a handle in this situation this seems to be completely out of control

00:12:09.420 yeah well i think you go back so we rewind the clock a little bit 20 years ago there was this

00:12:16.060 this uh so-called political consensus which are always dangerous things because they stifle the

00:12:21.860 ability for people to come up with new innovative ideas and you get this group thing that takes

00:12:26.620 hold 20 years ago they came up with the idea that sit at that harm reduction so

00:12:31.860 you know safe injection sites needle exchanges all these things was what's

00:12:35.980 going to solve the drug problem and back then in the early 2000s in Vancouver

00:12:40.540 they called it you know the crisis the the drug crisis there's about a hundred

00:12:45.340 and seventy eight people dying 170 180 people dying each year from drug

00:12:51.220 overdoses last year it was 1700 so clearly the strategy is not working and yet you listen to

00:12:59.300 the politicians and what do they want to do they want to double down on the exact same strategy

00:13:04.020 uh increasing harm reduction that's that's their uh that's their narrative it's not that harm

00:13:09.580 reduction hasn't worked it's that they it hasn't been tried in its in its fullest and most

00:13:14.940 imaginative forms and of course now what they're doing is they want to set up set up these basically

00:13:20.300 their heroin vending machines placed throughout Vancouver and Victoria and I believe a couple

00:13:26.120 cities out east and that's their solution to the problem but no this is it's it's it's getting out

00:13:32.360 of control as you mentioned it's killed more people than COVID these are people that are you

00:13:37.360 know obviously they're ending their own lives but they're just I'm sure wrecking lives of their

00:13:41.820 friends and families and communities and neighborhoods we need to get them off drugs

00:13:46.100 and um the solution isn't to keep handing them uh free heroin or free uh hydromorphone or whatever

00:13:53.940 uh heroin-like substances uh are out there and and it only seems to be getting getting worse

00:14:01.340 from there i remember in in prince george like we actually did have a handle on on our poverty

00:14:06.440 situation here and the homelessness situation here the fires changed that a bit because they

00:14:11.200 evacuated everybody to Prince George. So they got people out of Williams Lake and out of various

00:14:17.260 other places that were threatened by the fire, and they brought them to Prince George.

00:14:21.900 And then, of course, the people who didn't return home were the transient populations of the various

00:14:27.100 communities that they had evacuated. So we've had an increase in our homeless population, which

00:14:31.920 that's fine. I mean, if we have to bear more of that and then work our way through that, that's

00:14:36.060 not the problem but there has been also an endemic of of crime and and drug-based death in prince

00:14:42.520 george and there's real problems with this and nobody's there seems to be a lack of leadership

00:14:46.480 here too it seems just a deficit of leadership throughout canada around this question nobody

00:14:50.520 wants people to die from drug overdoses even somebody who's totally unsympathetic to that

00:14:54.860 situation doesn't want that to happen what what does it look like turning that around aaron

00:14:59.940 well i think there's a couple things i think if you look at so some of these issues can't

00:15:05.600 be separated from each other so a lot of people will ask me like what's that what do you think

00:15:09.360 the solution is for homelessness for example um but i do think drug uh and mental illness gets

00:15:15.480 thrown in there as well but i think drug addiction and and uh you know this rampant drug use is the

00:15:22.940 is the number one problem um how do you deal with that well i think you got to deal with a couple

00:15:26.960 things i think one of the first things is that there are people that are genuinely mentally ill

00:15:32.160 I'm sure you've seen them, you know, whether it's wandering the streets of Prince George or downtown Vancouver or here in Victoria.

00:15:38.800 You know, these people need to be in like a hospital getting help.

00:15:42.660 And we've closed a lot of those institutions over the past 30, 40 years and the so-called mental hospitals.

00:15:50.000 And those need to be opened back up for that subset of individuals.

00:15:54.960 uh number two uh there's people that are shooting up drugs openly uh heroin fentanyl smoking crack

00:16:02.540 cocaine whatever the case may be um you know that didn't that that shouldn't be socially acceptable

00:16:07.840 you hear a lot from the far left about how we have to de-stigmatize drug use but i mean the reason

00:16:13.660 why it's stigmatized is because it's wiping out thousands of people every year like there's a

00:16:19.020 reason. It's like, you know, it's not something that should be seen as okay to be pursuing in

00:16:25.620 broad daylight. So I think what you need to do is you need to really fund and implement a strategy

00:16:32.660 that focuses on getting those people off of drugs so they can be integrated back into society,

00:16:37.460 can become taxpaying members of society. And I don't think that should be negotiable. And I think

00:16:43.540 third, in all of these tent cities, in these homeless encampments, as much as certain people

00:16:52.620 on city councils want to try to sweep this under the rug, the truth is crime is a major element.

00:16:59.780 And they use these encampments as kind of shelters to run whatever illicit operations they happen to

00:17:06.640 be involved with. And the big problem with that is that, you know, I know police officers, I'm sure

00:17:12.020 you do to people that work as crown prosecutors it is a revolving door system i mean these people

00:17:18.180 go in and they come back out they go in they come back out you know half the people you see getting

00:17:23.160 arrested now are out on parole um you know they they get a 10-year sentence and by the by the time

00:17:28.560 there's an appeal and parole they're out in a couple years plus you know getting uh you know

00:17:33.000 double the the time served before um before they get sentenced they get double time so i think

00:17:40.980 there's huge criminal justice reform issues as well that need to be dealt with so those three

00:17:45.180 issues combined i think need to compromise the first step but what they're doing now

00:17:49.580 is it doubled down doubling down on a strategy that by any metric has failed spectacularly

00:17:56.180 is is not going to be good for taxpayers and i don't think it's going to be good for the province

00:17:59.940 or the country well let's move out a little bit from victoria then a little bit up the island and

00:18:05.500 we're going to head over to fairy creek uh as far as i can tell the the situation there is again it's

00:18:10.900 a deficit of leadership and and of course a complete twist of things where uh supposedly

00:18:16.280 you know i'm a status first nation uh on my card it actually says that i'm an indian because that's

00:18:21.460 what's still on the card so i don't know why we're using that word as a slur saying it is a slur it's

00:18:25.540 like other slur words it still says it when they change the department they change my card i'll

00:18:29.680 stop saying that word but the point is that that you know as somebody who's right of center as a

00:18:34.980 status indian i've i've definitely been censored over the years i've had people come at me and be

00:18:39.740 very upset that i don't carry the narrative of our times uh that's all about victimhood and then

00:18:44.980 you have a similar situation going on here in uh in fairy creek where people who are trying to

00:18:50.620 develop something develop a resource be independent financially independent this is what we've talked

00:18:55.080 about for years when it comes to aboriginals and and the poverty that can happen on reserves how 1.00

00:18:59.840 we alleviate poverty suddenly some non-aboriginals show up and try to stop them from developing their 0.99

00:19:05.740 their their territory what's going on over there yeah i mean you nailed it so you have this group 0.99

00:19:11.200 of environmentalists who claim to be standing up for first nations on unseated land etc etc

00:19:17.260 except that the local first nations the bands that are there both the hereditary and the elected

00:19:24.000 leadership have all told them to leave they're actually involved and they've partnered with the

00:19:28.380 forestry industries they actually have a little sawmill uh in the first nations community obviously

00:19:33.660 it's it's and you know people forget like look at a map on where uh british columbia's first nations

00:19:39.980 are living these people are uh working and driving their wealth from the tech sector or downtown

00:19:47.000 you know vancouver's economy the vast majority of first nations are living in communities that

00:19:52.100 are dependent on the resource sector and bc that mainly means forestry and mining and um so you

00:19:59.080 know the the first nations leadership kind of across the board i believe there's been three

00:20:03.060 bands now that have basically told these environmentalists to beat it and to stop

00:20:08.200 with this hypocritical narrative. And, you know, that I don't know how these groups get away with

00:20:13.840 it. They just ignore the First Nations. They somehow spin it back into these bands have been

00:20:19.180 corrupted by the Indian Act or whatever, like even though they're elected by the people that

00:20:23.420 actually live in these communities. Like, you know, these people can can rationalize anything 0.94

00:20:27.500 to themselves it's it's uh quite something to watch i was told once that i had internalized

00:20:33.260 my oppression uh that i'd clearly done with the colonizer or something you know like i love john

00:20:38.540 a mcdonald and i know you love john a mcdonald i think john a mcdonald actually treated us pretty

00:20:44.060 well it was actually the liberal governments that succeeded him that tried to make things worse

00:20:48.780 it's the same thing that happened in british columbia the conservative governor of british

00:20:52.140 colombia as much as he wasn't going to give the franchise to them he did try to make a fair deals

00:20:57.820 with with the first nations around here and then it was a more to cosmos who comes in is like no 0.91

00:21:02.400 i'm a good progressive i'm just going to treat these people like complete crap and john a was

00:21:07.160 shocked when he got here that there were no deals put through how does this narrative get so twisted 0.94

00:21:12.300 i think the biggest problem is a ignorance of canadian history it's obviously not one that

00:21:22.600 that plagues you but i'm sure talking to to everyday people you'll notice this most people

00:21:27.700 don't under know much about canadian history now i mean we're not uh knocking out of the park with

00:21:33.840 the with the exciting and you know real real tenuous periods in the in the 1800s I think

00:21:43.240 that I'll be honest that's a credit to people like John A. Macdonald and Wilfred Laurier who

00:21:47.960 you look what happened in the United States obviously they had a civil war you look what

00:21:52.680 happened there with their indigenous populations I mean what happened up here they called it the 0.75

00:21:57.380 medicine line you know the border between Canada and the United States because one of the reasons

00:22:01.740 was a lot of those First Nations that were nomadic at the time,

00:22:07.180 when they came across Canada, that was the safe place.

00:22:09.880 That was where they could kind of seek safety and shelter and support

00:22:14.240 as opposed to the United States.

00:22:16.020 So I think that because there is that ignorance of history,

00:22:20.720 it allows activists with ulterior agendas to come in and distort it

00:22:27.520 and seed ideas into people's minds.

00:22:30.440 And you saw that even earlier this week in Charlottetown, PEI, where they passed this motion.

00:22:41.980 They said, OK, we're not going to tear down this statue of John A. MacDonald, but we need to erect this basically anti-Canada monument, talking about all the terrible things that John A. MacDonald did.

00:22:53.980 He was the architect of residential, like just bought into the narrative completely.

00:22:59.720 And none of it's true.

00:23:00.780 And I know when I read this and I see the city councillors,

00:23:03.760 like it doesn't take very long to read John A.

00:23:06.280 MacDonald's biography.

00:23:07.440 It doesn't take very long.

00:23:08.780 Like,

00:23:08.960 I don't know why people in the media and politics aren't educating

00:23:12.460 themselves on literally the core of Canadian history and how things

00:23:17.880 actually develop.

00:23:18.620 You obviously know exactly what you're talking about.

00:23:20.220 You referenced it.

00:23:20.920 John A.

00:23:21.500 MacDonald was not some caricature racist from the 1800s.

00:23:25.580 He was certainly not.

00:23:26.820 um the the policies that that came directly after him in the next 30 40 years were more racist than

00:23:33.440 anything that he was pursuing at the time he generally wanted to his biggest crime was that

00:23:39.440 um you know he wanted to assimilate everybody because he thought everybody should be equal 0.85

00:23:43.520 regardless of race and be part of canada um and so he wasn't so he was but you know he gave black

00:23:50.660 canadians the right to vote he granted most indigenous canadians the right to vote which

00:23:54.960 was later repealed by the liberals he he did all these incredible things and was friends with many

00:24:00.520 first nations individuals and yet he's uh characterized in this way as as a white

00:24:06.680 supremacist as if that was ever a thought in in mcdonald's mind it's just it's it's amazing again

00:24:13.220 like i think in a sense you said that we we on the right you know sometimes we're just not getting

00:24:17.500 ahead on the narrative right the left is dictating the narrative the right is just they're just

00:24:22.000 playing catch up all the time they're still arguing they're arguing about something that

00:24:25.300 the left won 20 years ago and the left is on to the next thing i think this is one of those things

00:24:30.340 it's just where where the right needs to just kind of counter and be like no you know what like we're

00:24:35.080 going to make sure that we have a clear idea of who john a mcdonald is i don't care if we have to

00:24:40.240 like support a documentary i don't care if we have to get our own you know conservative version of

00:24:44.580 netflix that that preaches the good word on true history when it comes to canada it's it they're

00:24:50.580 just it's it's that we just seem to have so much against us whether it's the cbc and the other

00:24:55.920 mainstream media and everything else and the liberal party of canada with its consensus and

00:24:59.980 its natural governing status it just their narrative is what goes and for some reason

00:25:04.440 conservatives just can't they can't seem to fight back or unite enough to fight back

00:25:08.940 i agree 100 it's a huge problem i mean it's um the one thing is that obviously there's people

00:25:16.960 that are leading these campaigns for example against johnny mcdonald who are doing it very

00:25:21.160 deliberately who believe in a in a kind of a post nation state world who believe um that

00:25:28.040 to help that agenda proceed forward it helps to basically tear down canada's history and the

00:25:35.680 ethos behind the country and some of the foundational values and stories because

00:25:39.660 countries are built on stories so um i think that's why they've targeted them look like

00:25:44.420 Wilfrid Laurier obviously was prime minister continued and I mean repealed the right to vote

00:25:51.440 to aboriginals Chinese head tax increased 500 percent etc etc was prime minister for I don't

00:25:58.020 know 15 years or something like that I mean no one's even talking about Wilfrid Laurier not even

00:26:03.620 being brought up why do they keep focusing on Johnny McDonald it wasn't his policies the reason

00:26:08.340 why they're focusing on Johnny McDonald is because he founded the country and to these individuals

00:26:13.840 on the radical left um they think and this is this is so important they think that the founding of

00:26:20.920 canada was a travesty it was not a positive it was it was it's like this it was the original sin

00:26:27.700 was the actual existence of the country in the first place and they resent that and that's why

00:26:33.080 they're targeting him it's not for any of his particular policies because he didn't he didn't

00:26:36.820 i mean residential schools started happening before him they weren't mandatory till after he

00:26:40.860 died they continued up till the 19 well i mean 50s and 60s and i think technically there was one

00:26:47.800 open till the 1990s so it's it's um there's nothing to do with his policies it's about what

00:26:53.200 he represented and he represents canada and they fundamentally believe that canada was not a

00:27:00.180 legitimate country that should have never been created in the first place do you do you think

00:27:05.120 that maybe a huge part of the reason then that canada just can't seem to build anything canada

00:27:10.220 It can't finish a pipeline, it can't get its dams built on time.

00:27:18.060 The ships are a complete debacle.

00:27:20.340 Does that have to do with our narrative lacking?

00:27:23.460 We're seeing this now even with the United States,

00:27:25.380 and they had a gas shortage on the East Coast,

00:27:27.160 but they're also talking about shutting down Line 5 to the East Coast,

00:27:31.060 though admittedly a lot of Western sovereignists who watch this channel

00:27:34.020 probably be pretty happy about that for a little while

00:27:36.760 and let them eat it for a little while.

00:27:38.560 But nonetheless, like what happened to Canada's vision? Why? Why are we essentially a vassal state of America? Why don't we have our own story?

00:27:47.680 Well, I think, I mean, you can look at issues in the Canadian media. I mean, I mean, what you just said is 100% accurate. I think the number one thing is there's been a lack of political leadership in Canada, though, for the last.

00:28:00.120 for the last 50 years at least um and that lack of political leadership i think has led to a lot

00:28:07.760 of the problems we have i mean look we're always going to have problems telling our own story

00:28:12.060 in the age of of the 24 7 news cycle and the internet when we're living next door to the

00:28:17.140 united states which is a cultural behemoth um and you know both speaking the same language and

00:28:22.520 having similar um similar historical roots in in great britain uh but we haven't done a good job

00:28:29.960 of telling our story, about how we're differentiated from the United States, about how our paths

00:28:33.880 diverged, obviously, significantly in the 1700s and through the 1800s, and, you know, the historical

00:28:40.980 realities that we can be proud of, whether it's the first, the two world wars, or whether it's how

00:28:46.260 we dealt with Indigenous people. In fact, that's another thing, is like, if you look at what

00:28:51.220 happened in Australia and the United States, or really almost anywhere else in the world,

00:28:55.200 We should actually be proud about how we work with Indigenous people.

00:29:00.740 And for sure, it wasn't perfect. 0.65

00:29:02.520 And for sure, and this is the other thing that drives me crazy, for sure, if you apply

00:29:06.940 today's standards back 200 years in the past, things don't look so good.

00:29:11.800 But I mean, do you really want to compare where we are today to 200 years in the future?

00:29:15.780 Because I don't know where they're going to be at as far as values and how they govern

00:29:19.380 things.

00:29:19.680 Maybe we're going to look like dinosaurs. 0.71

00:29:21.540 So I think that's a ridiculous, I mean, that's not how you're supposed to read and understand

00:29:24.920 history you have to look at it through the context of the time and what's happening everywhere around

00:29:29.340 the world and uh by any reasonable comparison uh canada was a phenomenal place ahead of its time

00:29:36.500 and johnny mcdonald was you know the single the central figure that brought that all together

00:29:42.000 i'm not sure if uh this is uh this is a fair kind of point we hadn't discussed this beforehand but

00:29:48.840 it just occurred to me that at one point i i heard a rumor that you had thought about seeking the bc

00:29:53.660 liberal leadership is that still happening i i haven't heard any updates for a little while

00:29:59.340 yeah that's still uh that's still happening i mean so what's going on there so obviously

00:30:03.260 normally these races are four or five months here they made the vote in february so uh i've got as

00:30:11.100 as you know got my own brand going on and and content that's being put out there and plus with

00:30:16.300 covid and i don't think anybody cares about something this far in advance for a party like

00:30:20.700 the bc liberals so it's still something i'm seriously considering um but i'm not going to

00:30:25.320 be making moves until you know middle of june at the earliest so i think there's there's there's a

00:30:30.760 huge amount of time and i'm just going to keep keep doing what i do best which is communicate

00:30:34.620 to british colombians uh on the issues that matter to them so and look the bc liberals are a party

00:30:41.540 that's in need of serious renewal they're in need of serious new ideas they have a lot of baggage

00:30:46.760 they barely stand for anything anymore last election was a complete embarrassment it was

00:30:51.260 like a choice between the NDP and the NDP light uh and Andrew Wilkinson had no charisma didn't

00:30:57.080 present any new ideas didn't present any new alternatives I'll tell you something Nathan like

00:31:01.660 this is this was something six months ago I wasn't even considering this couldn't have been further

00:31:06.640 from my radar but I sat there during the last election and it was embarrassing like I watched

00:31:12.180 that that election debate it was embarrassing it was like these are the choices that were being

00:31:16.100 presented. I feel like I know British Columbians. I feel like there's space for a different voice

00:31:21.640 here. So we'll see how it goes. But I think it would be nice. I think British Columbians would

00:31:27.920 relish the opportunity to have a real choice in an election and actually debate some new ideas.

00:31:35.180 And that's another aspect of what's happening here in BC is there is this deficit of leadership. We

00:31:41.160 had this election come to pass uh the opposition party might as well have been campaigning for the 0.88

00:31:46.820 for the party that was trying to take power it was it was all nonsense it was complete nonsense

00:31:51.920 and there was just this complete lack of vision for the province now we're getting into a whole

00:31:56.600 whole other level of things with apparently the electoral boundaries are going to be changed for

00:32:00.940 places like where i live and supposedly we're going to eliminate a bunch of ridings north of

00:32:05.160 hope beyond hope as they like to call us from uh vancouver they have to remember that of course

00:32:10.220 it's beyond hope the other way as well uh and and they and and so they're going to eliminate some of 0.88

00:32:15.340 our ridings and shift all of the demographics down into the lower mainland like if we don't

00:32:19.660 have a provincial senate how are we supposed to have proper representation for the regions of bc

00:32:23.720 where all the gas comes from all the timber all the hydroelectric but they don't want to give us

00:32:28.820 a voice yeah the regions that are that are uh providing the tax revenues that build the the

00:32:35.440 hospitals in the schools and other communities yeah i think it's look it's not surprising the

00:32:39.860 ndp uh the one thing i will say about this is is political parties tend to kind of gerrymander in

00:32:46.460 their advantage um so this isn't this isn't super surprising but uh we'll see how the details get

00:32:53.260 worked out but yeah of course of course it's concerning now that being said i think you know

00:32:58.080 the bc liberals um you know with the right leader in the right set of policy should be able to appeal

00:33:03.540 to a broad cross-section of British Columbians.

00:33:06.620 I think there are people that are fed up

00:33:08.040 with the direction that things are going,

00:33:10.480 that live in Abbotsford, that live in Langley,

00:33:12.660 that live in Nanaimo,

00:33:14.020 and that live in Prince George, as you said.

00:33:16.440 So I don't think that,

00:33:18.640 while I basically agree with the premise

00:33:20.340 that you're saying,

00:33:20.980 I don't think that should limit the ability

00:33:23.460 to actually offer an alternative in the election

00:33:26.000 and campaign strongly.

00:33:28.600 One of those big issues would be, of course,

00:33:31.300 you know, making housing more affordable,

00:33:33.540 in this province things have gotten a little bit out of control here i mean it's funny like when i

00:33:37.180 make complaints from here people are like oh yeah right four hundred thousand dollars try yeah that's

00:33:41.400 langley 15 years ago you've got nothing to argue about i'm like well that's still four hundred

00:33:45.320 thousand dollars in print storage for a bc bungalow that was built you know when they were still

00:33:50.640 building some of the dams up here and and on and on top of that it's you know it's got two by four

00:33:56.740 walls and it was renovated like that's nice and everything but that was for that was a doctor's

00:34:01.260 house just 10 years ago i'm not that old like it's like i don't i don't know what happened to

00:34:06.020 my city but something's gotten completely out of control yeah i think there's a couple things

00:34:11.000 happening i mean on the national picture obviously inflation i think you see what's happening with

00:34:16.600 with lumber prices and and oil steel copper these kind of things that's kind of an overarching issue

00:34:22.380 about uh well i mean we can't print money forever and expect there to be no consequences so i think

00:34:27.480 that that's part of it but um yeah generally speaking look it's not fair to british columbians

00:34:35.860 who grew up in their communities who grew up in their neighborhoods and um are basically forced

00:34:41.020 to leave them because they can't afford a place to live i mean i'm 31 so you know it's right around

00:34:47.240 uh myself and my friends are trying to enter a housing market right now i mean you're taking

00:34:53.660 a massive risk you don't know what's going to happen it's huge amounts of money these

00:34:57.360 interest rates you're borrowing just huge huge amounts of cash and I don't think it's it's it's

00:35:05.000 very risky and you know it's it really is a little bit of a house of cards not to kind of beat a dead

00:35:09.920 horse with that with that analogy but it's look I think there's a couple things also like on the

00:35:16.260 speculation side of things I've said this you know we can't be speculation plays a role in the stock

00:35:25.620 market it plays a role in financial markets right because it injects capital and and liquidity where

00:35:31.040 you need it but in housing markets where people start speculating and people start gambling

00:35:35.820 especially people from outside the country you're really playing with people's lives um so that can

00:35:41.320 be an issue now i think it's been overblown a little bit that the issue that's playing it but

00:35:45.200 i think it needs to be taken seriously the other side of this coin is that there's a lot of

00:35:49.760 municipal governments that have made the building process to match housing supply to get projects

00:35:58.120 built so cumbersome tens of thousands of dollars in regulations huge delays to even get you know

00:36:04.700 projects approved i checked before i came on to chat with you today the empire state building was

00:36:10.040 built in just over a year which was the tallest building at the time i mean if you tried to do

00:36:14.560 that again in vancouver you'd be lucky to get that completed in a decade i think with all the

00:36:19.720 regulations you'd have to go through um with the municipal governments so i think that there is uh

00:36:26.060 you got to come at it from a couple different angles um but one of the things is you gotta um

00:36:31.080 you know and i will say i'll be completely frank with you there is a there is an issue happening

00:36:35.920 in british columbia at large and in vancouver victoria specifically where the secret's out a

00:36:42.500 little bit you've got a lot of people moving here from alberta from uh saskatchewan from out east

00:36:49.480 uh just because of the climate obviously for all the incompetence in government it's an incredibly

00:36:54.980 beautiful place to live um so i think you do have a huge influx of people as well and you're going

00:37:00.820 to get bidding wars and the price of housing is going to go up but i think that there's uh uh like

00:37:06.020 so many issues in our society um you know it's not that the government needs to find a solution

00:37:12.580 in some cases some cases that the government's actually the problem and if they remove themselves

00:37:17.080 a little bit more from some of these the regulatory uh moves that they've been making to restrict

00:37:23.080 housing building and development you'll see supply rise and you'll watch those prices level off

00:37:29.160 yeah and get to a natural plateau there's i mean you know this is something that's always been an

00:37:34.840 issue and it'll always be an issue affordability and that sort of thing but at a national level

00:37:39.000 and i'm kind of pivoting now towards the federal tories and what's happening there the election

00:37:42.840 that's coming down i mean again even even there whether we're talking about covid or any of the

00:37:48.320 other issues that are plaguing us right now again there seems to be a deficit of leadership the

00:37:52.760 tories don't seem to be doing a very good job with opposition against the liberals they seem

00:37:56.840 to have lost their step they had a really good time with the we scandal did really well with

00:38:01.120 jody wilson raybold did really well with some parts of the vaccine rollout and that sort of

00:38:05.760 thing but but ever since you know aaron decided that we're going to have a carbon tax in in going

00:38:10.860 in the face of his own supporters right the can the coalition for life deciding the policy of of

00:38:16.740 the of the conservative party of canada uh telling him roundly rejecting roundly his his proposal at

00:38:22.220 the convention floor yet he goes and says that there will be a more complicated less transparent

00:38:27.300 and apparently kind of canadian canadian tire money system for carbon taxation i mean what

00:38:33.820 what are the tories doing are they trying to lose the next election sure looks that way uh i mean

00:38:40.780 look I think the issue that they're making and O'Toole and his team around him is that I'll tell

00:38:48.780 you they need to get some of the people that were on the team during the leadership that have left

00:38:52.360 left since but the they're making this classic mistake that is just made by this the political

00:38:58.200 establishment over and over again and that is that they think Canadians view uh themselves on

00:39:03.440 a linear political spectrum and they say okay if the conservatives are are you know here and the

00:39:09.340 Liberals are here. If we just move a little bit more to the left, we'll capture all this vote

00:39:14.740 and then we'll win the election. And of course, most Canadians don't see themselves on a linear

00:39:19.000 political spectrum. They just want common sense policies that make sense to them and they respect

00:39:25.120 taxpayer dollars. And they're not caught up in ideology and left and right and all these kinds

00:39:31.520 of things. Of course, people that are heavily involved in politics are, but most people are

00:39:35.380 not like that so these these decisions to move left um don't end up kind of giving the electoral

00:39:43.720 fruits that the people that make these moves think that they will and it happens over and over again

00:39:49.340 and what it actually ends up backfiring because it makes the leader because just as important as

00:39:53.580 the policies for people actually i would say more important is the credibility and the authenticity

00:39:59.660 and the honesty of the leader and everybody can i'm sure people see this aaron tool green bucks

00:40:06.140 plan so some people hate it obviously the conservative base very a couple people might

00:40:12.000 like it a lot of people might be indifferent to it but what it does show is it seems inauthentic

00:40:16.980 it seems doesn't seem credible it seems like a flip-flop and of course it makes you wonder

00:40:22.060 um as i'm sure it makes many conservatives wonder uh they might disagree with the policy

00:40:28.160 but maybe more importantly is they start doubting Aaron O'Toole's commitment to the conservative

00:40:34.480 principles that he ran on in the leadership and that's what I think is actually more important

00:40:38.940 and if you just look like some kind of uh weather vane that's going to start pointing in different

00:40:44.540 directions depending on what the how the wind's blowing that's not a quality of leadership and

00:40:50.940 it's not something that I think voters will get behind to the point of the carbon tax as well I

00:40:58.040 I mean, British Columbia has had a carbon tax for years that hasn't done anything for our fires.

00:41:03.440 It hasn't appeased the climate gods.

00:41:06.280 I've kind of taken to a mode of calling it all a bit of a theocracy, especially now that we have COVID.

00:41:11.560 It's just it really does seem like there's this high priestly class that runs everything.

00:41:16.260 It's like a technocracy.

00:41:17.660 It's and it's more inhuman than any other theocracy, almost on planet Earth, except for maybe Iran.

00:41:22.200 and and the fact of the matter is that it just it doesn't it doesn't appeal to human people

00:41:26.660 human beings on a human level and to people on a people level and and finally with what what's

00:41:31.820 going on with the federal carbon tax and even the question of of the pipeline especially line five

00:41:36.300 out of out of michigan there and everything it what like what are we doing like we we know that

00:41:42.060 we need energy this is a cold place we need energy even victoria gets cold it gets you know a couple

00:41:48.160 of snowfalls a year everybody forgets how to drive it's a bit of a crazy time but like we need energy

00:41:53.960 we must have energy and until we get until we get to that green future whatever that's going to look

00:41:58.940 like god knows how much that would cost and what kind of raw materials and and rare minerals it

00:42:03.180 would take like why do people think that we could just somehow switch off the the taps or turn off

00:42:08.100 the lights like it's that's not how it works 100 and and uh i mean those that think we're going to

00:42:14.860 solve climate change by taxing Canadians into taking the bus are woefully misinformed and are

00:42:22.620 going to be incredibly disappointed as China continues to build new coal power plants every

00:42:28.840 week. Yeah, I think that it doesn't make a lot of sense. I think it makes a lot of people feel

00:42:36.740 good about themselves, that they're doing something. Because as you said, when you look

00:42:40.220 the statistics and you look at the facts it's not it's not doing anything and um as you said

00:42:46.460 and i want to make another point because you just mentioned that we need the energy right like it's

00:42:50.140 it's cold here people need there's going to be cars powered by gasoline for decades into the

00:42:56.060 future it's just it's just uh just how it is but the other thing is that the world is going to

00:43:02.860 continue to need this energy so there's the one question about ourselves there's the second

00:43:07.260 question that I think is even more obvious, believe it or not, which is that as long as

00:43:10.860 the world needs energy, the natural follow-up question is going to be, where do we want the

00:43:15.320 energy to come from? Do we want it to come from Russia? Do we want it to come from Iran? Do we

00:43:21.160 want it to come from Venezuela? Or do we want it to come from Canada, where we have the best

00:43:27.120 environmental regulations in the world, where we plow a lot of that money back into healthcare and

00:43:31.560 education where we have human rights high paying quality jobs um and a resource that's only going

00:43:40.500 to be around for so long mathematically speaking so i think it's it should be a no-brainer i mean

00:43:46.560 the trans mountain expansion pipeline is finally almost complete because the government bought it's

00:43:52.400 going to be hilariously over budget i mean we're going to be the only only the government could

00:43:56.040 lose money on an oil pipeline but they're going to find a way exactly exactly but they'll find a

00:44:03.040 way to do it uh just watch but you know when justin trudeau i don't know if you remember this

00:44:07.900 when he made that decision to say okay well we're going to let trans mountain proceed or we're going

00:44:11.980 to cancel northern gateway even though it got all the environmental permits uh past the nebs

00:44:17.340 regulations everything was sound built being built by enbridge which is a world-class company one of

00:44:23.440 canada's world-class companies um we have all the supply that we're going to need what happened a

00:44:28.260 couple years later keystone xl canceled this is the exact policy when john a mcdonald it's the

00:44:35.460 exact same thing repeating itself when he had a choice to build the national railway it would

00:44:39.920 have been cheaper a lot cheaper and easier to cut down through the united states and if anyone's

00:44:44.680 ever uh driven across the country you'll know how this works it's it's uh it's a similar distance

00:44:51.180 But the land that you're building through is a lot different through the Canadian Shield through Ontario than cutting down below the Great Lakes through the United States.

00:44:59.400 But if you did that, you would have been capitulating on our sovereignty and basically made the entire country beholden to the U.S., which back then was also a credible chance that they wanted to invade Canada. 0.55

00:45:11.840 Part of their whole kind of North America belongs to them mentality at the time.

00:45:15.760 now what's going on with these pipelines is we canned northern gateway for no apparent reason

00:45:21.600 no logical reason instead became completely dependent on the completion of the keystone

00:45:25.960 xl pipeline which was then cancelled by the incoming uh biden administration for no apparent

00:45:31.140 reason just to appease part of his base but he doesn't care what trudeau's trudeau's doing now

00:45:35.900 you've got this disaster with line five which would have been completely uh a non-issue if

00:45:41.180 they built energy east as well and again we're completely we're we should be an energy superpower

00:45:46.420 and instead we're a laughing stock being concerned about or getting our oil supplies to our two

00:45:51.880 largest provinces and it's it's um i mean the line five thing is hilarious like if this happens

00:45:57.720 and you have canada which i think is the third largest reserves of oil in the world and we have

00:46:02.980 gasoline shortages in our two largest provinces that will be the epitome of the failure of political

00:46:08.920 leadership um and the truth is that trans mountain might be done in a the expansion might be done in

00:46:14.820 a year but northern gateway should be should be being finished right now and energy east should

00:46:20.480 have already been built and they're not and we're losing we're losing billions of dollars

00:46:26.300 i would say each and every day from those two pipelines not have being built and that's a

00:46:31.500 significant issue it's a huge issue it's a huge issue especially as we pile on debt which we're

00:46:36.560 then going to have to pay interest on which is then going to go to somebody else and our kids

00:46:40.660 and their kids and their kids kids are all going to have to pay for it it's just insane

00:46:44.620 one of the aspects to that that you know kind of come rears its head pretty quickly i mean there's

00:46:50.360 news out of alberta today that jason kenny is actively being called to resign by his own caucus

00:46:56.100 but but throughout the west there's this agitation and of course the western standard

00:47:00.480 does a lot of this around this question,

00:47:03.660 the question of sovereignty.

00:47:05.280 I don't mean to put you on the spot,

00:47:07.380 but where do you land on the question of sovereignty?

00:47:10.220 Do you think that that's a way forward for the West?

00:47:12.840 Do you think they just need to threaten it

00:47:14.240 to get what they want?

00:47:15.220 Or do you think we just need to fundamentally reform Ottawa

00:47:17.420 and keep federalism alive?

00:47:20.760 Yeah, I don't think, I mean, I'm a Canadian.

00:47:24.580 I definitely consider myself in the Canadian patriot class,

00:47:28.820 if you were.

00:47:29.240 I look at the history of Canada, the country that I grew up in.

00:47:33.160 I love this country.

00:47:34.140 I don't think there's significant cultural differences, which is normally what leads to a breakup or a separatist movement like in Quebec that does have its own culture for anyone who hasn't lived there for a period of time.

00:47:46.320 But the so what I view it as a massive failure of political leadership that has disproportionately hurt the West and disproportionately hurt Alberta and Saskatchewan.

00:48:00.320 Look, I know lots of and this is why I'm not really on board.

00:48:04.400 I 100% understand the frustrations, but I think that entire separatist movement, unlike separatist movements in other countries, if you magically waved a magic wand and got rid of Justin Trudeau and you brought in a sensible, common sense government that respected the West, I think that's all that people want.

00:48:25.320 I think that's fundamentally what people want. And this the separatist movement is born out of the fact that people are watching the situation and just can't even see it's the political leadership is the lack of common sense options is so dramatic that people are ready to throw in the towel.

00:48:42.860 And I totally appreciate where they're coming from.

00:48:46.840 That's for sure.

00:48:47.960 Obviously, I'm doing everything I can to try to turn that around internally.

00:48:51.920 But, yeah, it's a huge problem.

00:48:54.420 People need to step up.

00:48:55.860 And obviously, that's why I was disappointed with O'Toole's carbon tax thing, because I feel like there's a lot of people in Western Canada that just like, here we go again, like another person from Central Canada who makes promises to the West and then throws us under the bus.

00:49:09.340 but you know i i thought harper i thought harper was was a good prime minister um that wasn't that

00:49:15.920 long ago you know he was there for feels like forever yeah it feels like forever ago but

00:49:23.660 anyway so that's that's my point on that that i still think this country like i i really i really

00:49:28.640 am a uh johnny mcdonald conservative who who you know he he was the one that brought the west into

00:49:34.120 the country in the first place connected the west delivered to the west uh from the 85 rebellion to

00:49:40.580 building that railway to um you know everything bring british columbia into confederation all

00:49:46.300 of these kinds of things i mean he was kind of that original original person but we we need

00:49:51.060 someone with that kind of imagination to really stand up and take take that on and uh you know

00:49:56.460 not be afraid to take on the toronto elites the montreal elites the ottawa elites that so

00:50:01.200 so often dominate policymaking in this country absolutely i and i must i must concede here again

00:50:08.500 i didn't mean i didn't mean to put you on the spot there i am rather ambivalent around the

00:50:12.140 question of sovereignty myself i i definitely think that it's a way of uh maybe getting some

00:50:16.640 things that we want by threatening it i think quebec has done very well with that and if you

00:50:20.820 could get some of the deals in the west that quebec has gotten for itself i think that would

00:50:24.860 be great but in general i would like the borders of canada externally to remain the same internally

00:50:30.620 i think there could be some rearrangement right down to the fact that even earlier as we were

00:50:34.620 talking about uh the fact that there's going to be a rearrangement of our electoral boundaries

00:50:39.260 inside of bc i i think that there might come time for us to start treating bc like kind of the way

00:50:45.500 switzerland gets treated with its cantons it's you know what different sections of bc need to have

00:50:49.860 their own say vancouver can do what it wants to do and and other parts of bc need to be able to not

00:50:55.180 not go along with it whether we're talking about graduated licensing or the sky train and and

00:51:00.300 subsidizing that, you know, that's all great when I'm visiting there, but I don't want to pay for

00:51:03.800 it when I'm away, you know, and so there needs to be a rearrangement. But I think that's Canada in

00:51:07.520 general, there needs to be a rearrangement, everybody feels like they're paying for each

00:51:10.700 other's stuff and none of their own, and they're not getting a fair deal. Maybe as we kind of close

00:51:15.520 here, Aaron, you could tell us just a little bit about what what's kind of on the horizon for you,

00:51:19.900 what are you thinking about? I know that you've done some documentaries here, there and everywhere

00:51:25.320 you're talking, you're trying to bring people real discussions, break through the political

00:51:29.560 correctness and give people an honest look at things what's kind of on your agenda for the next

00:51:33.640 little while right so uh i haven't i'll be announcing the next couple days but i'm doing

00:51:39.680 a second season of my show politics explained which was which aired in the fall uh which are

00:51:45.900 20 minute deeper dives into different issues the first season we did things like the rise of cancel

00:51:51.100 culture uh meeting the protesters that oppose pipelines in canada that kind of thing really

00:51:56.100 deep dives that that uh interview a lot of the key players and key experts on various topics

00:52:01.460 then going into the field and exploring those issues directly we're doing one on forestry and

00:52:05.680 what's going on at fairy creek i already started filming that so uh that's going to have my plate

00:52:10.640 pretty full for the next month uh at that point as we move that to post-production i'm going to

00:52:16.200 take the serious look and and make a decision on provincial politics here and the bc liberal

00:52:21.700 leadership and and we'll see where that ends up um and we'll see where they uh we'll see where

00:52:27.160 the province and country is at that time my thing has always been i love doing what i'm doing now

00:52:33.320 i don't have any particular interest in getting into politics but i'm just so exhausted sitting

00:52:39.740 on the sidelines and watching a huge number of british colombians or canadians whatever the case

00:52:46.300 may be not have a voice i feel like they don't have a voice i feel you guys are doing a great

00:52:50.840 job at the western standard because the media is one of those other the mainstream media is another

00:52:54.360 one of those places where a huge number uh possibly you could say a majority of canadians

00:52:58.540 don't have a voice um so i think it's important to start to start countering that in the media

00:53:04.000 in politics all these different avenues it can't be one or the other and um i'm just kind of always

00:53:09.200 keeping my eye my eyes open for where i feel that i can do uh the most good and the be the most

00:53:17.920 effective at advancing those ideas so that's that's kind of what i'm up to right now and definitely

00:53:23.040 wake up every morning and feel like i'm on the front lines of this of this fight and i'm sure

00:53:27.260 you're the same same way with so your first question today was uh you know every reading

00:53:33.620 through these news headlines every morning it's always something it's always something every

00:53:37.740 morning something insane is going on so something insane completely insane the charlotte the

00:53:43.580 charlottetown thing with with with john a it just and maybe maybe that's a perfect place to kind of

00:53:49.400 conclude eric what if if you could give one one message to people who are totally don't don't

00:53:54.280 know what to think of john a don't know what to think of of the country he founded what would you

00:53:58.680 tell them what is the one thing they need to know about that man and about this country to to have

00:54:03.860 some pride in it and move forward without johnny the country wouldn't exist so if you think that

00:54:11.260 canada through its history it's 150 plus year history has been a net positive on the world has

00:54:18.000 it been a net positive on your life and a net positive on the vast majority of people that

00:54:22.900 live here if you think it's been a force for good if you think everything on balance it's been

00:54:28.900 something that we can be proud of then we should be proud of johnny mcdonald and we need to

00:54:33.020 remember his story and and if you believe all those things i think you should be celebrated

00:54:39.160 and people should find but don't take my word for it there's doc there's uh biographies been

00:54:45.140 been written about him uh even the internet which is which is a misleading place at times

00:54:50.720 if you spend an hour or two um you can get a pretty good idea of the man that he was

00:54:56.440 but uh that's what i would say is is he is you know single-handedly unlike many other countries

00:55:03.160 in the world like germany france italy that were somewhat predestined to become nation states

00:55:10.040 uh canada was not and it took the leadership of one man in particular uh in charlatetown

00:55:17.200 to bring the four original colonies together and then rope in uh the rest over the next

00:55:22.660 the subsequent decades so if you think canada is a good place you've got johnny mcdonald to thank

00:55:29.600 and i think that should be celebrated i completely agree and you know i do think that there's it

00:55:36.980 whatever whatever might need to be reformed in this country whether you're looking at it from

00:55:40.440 the right or the left the fact the matter is is that we have we're very blessed to have this

00:55:44.200 country and uh hopefully we can preserve it and and make it a better place a more equitable place

00:55:49.060 for everyone where people do feel like they have a stake in it and a voice for sure 100 percent

00:55:54.620 thank you so much for joining us today aaron and we hope we have you on again soon

00:55:59.540 thanks for having me would be happy to come back anytime absolutely we'll follow up with you

00:56:05.160 well we're uh very thankful of course for uh aaron being on with us today and now we get to do the

00:56:13.660 whole thing that we've done a couple of times on the show so we're going to walk everybody through

00:56:17.060 it very briefly here this is a live show uh we're not tucker carlson we don't have the my pillow guy

00:56:23.440 to cut to here uh we are live and we don't have any commercials so unfortunately we are going to

00:56:29.620 have to take a quick quick break uh we're going to just cut the feed for a moment it'll still be

00:56:35.340 live don't worry and we're going to rearrange things here because we're going uh having someone

00:56:39.400 in studio our guest here today is going to be stewart parkert stick around for that

00:56:42.980 we're just going to be gone for probably about one minute all right

00:56:53.440 Thank you.

00:57:23.440 And just like that, Stuart Parker has appeared.

00:57:51.920 Look at that. Look at how we did there. That went pretty well. Stuart, you know, it's been a bit of a week. There's gas shortages in the East Coast. There's threats of Line 5 being shut down. There's, of course, I mean, it's a little ways back now, but there was that terrible overdose in Victoria. And here locally, we might have our boundaries completely changed in BC. What is happening? We're going to bring that a little bit closer to you.

00:58:16.880 All right. Much appreciated. Well, it's interesting. I was talking with my friend, Art Vandenberg, who really tracks the fossil fuel industry. And he was talking about, well, what's broken with line five? What's causing the problems? And the answer is, it's not the part of the physical infrastructure you think. It's the computer system that does the billing.

00:58:37.860 huh so the gas is there but the company won't release it until it can bill for it

00:58:45.320 and right now the billing software is down and i think that really speaks to our time doesn't it's

00:58:53.080 like oh no it's broken what do you mean broken well i can't charge people money for it so it

00:58:57.780 doesn't work uh you know i don't know i might install some software to make some guesses make

00:59:06.040 some deals with some local authorities about how to average out the billing and move forward. But

00:59:12.500 we don't live in that world. We live in a world where the gas line is taken hostage. And then

00:59:19.320 the person who owns the gas line takes us hostage to deal with the hostage situation.

00:59:24.260 I mean, that's, that's brilliant, right? Like, why don't we just hold a knife to yourself? You

00:59:28.360 you've got them, you've got them. They can't take you away from you. You're the perfect

00:59:32.140 hostage taker of yourself exactly so it's all coming together we often think that things aren't

00:59:37.960 working when in fact they're working exactly as they were intended to exactly as they were designed

00:59:43.940 which is don't move the gas until the money flows exactly and uh that's um you know that that hasn't

00:59:52.560 gotten any less true since frank herbert wrote dune and they kept repeating the spice must flow

00:59:57.500 The spice must flow. That's all that's going on here. But it is unfortunate that we have so much

01:00:06.000 in North America dependent upon a privately owned pipeline system. I thought Aaron Ekman was really

01:00:13.240 on point when he said, look, if this is vital infrastructure, socialize it. Put it in the hands

01:00:18.260 of the state so the state can move it. Or you can argue it's not vital infrastructure. It's just a

01:00:26.540 that people use to make money. And then we can take a different position. And then people can

01:00:32.000 go, the other really sad warning I saw associated with all this was people taking plastic bags to

01:00:37.920 the gas station. Yeah, that was, I didn't really know what to make of that. That was a, that was

01:00:43.120 one of those moments where I sat there and I was like, oh no. It's one of those not even wrong

01:00:48.240 situations. It's too wrong in too many ways at the same time. Exactly. All I can say is let's

01:00:54.440 remember, folks, that between May and September, Easterners are not freezing in the dark, right?

01:01:02.560 That stereotype we have from Peter Lougheed in Alberta was lovely back when Eastern energy

01:01:08.140 consumption peaked in the winter, which it doesn't anymore. It peaks because air conditioners take

01:01:15.280 more power than heating systems do. Well, because you're having to convert it three times in order

01:01:22.180 to get to the same thing converting it right you're you have to heat something up in order to

01:01:26.720 make something colder right it's contrary to you know you're you're working against entropy

01:01:31.640 and so the laws of science would say don't cry too hard for the easterners they can turn off 0.79

01:01:38.400 their conditioning get a hibachi and cook the stuff that's thawing in their freezer yeah of

01:01:43.080 course of course i think those are i think that that's where we i i just can't get that excited

01:01:48.400 about energy crises during the summer i mean i lived out east i hate i hate that mississippi air

01:01:55.120 mass i just sweated all the time sweating was like my job and my phd was my side gig but uh

01:02:02.540 anyway but but sweating is what you sign up for if you're from there so no i i remember visiting

01:02:08.380 just the great lakes just just just the southern ontario i was in toronto i'm just visiting there

01:02:12.900 for five minutes i was like i need to leave i gotta get out of here oh yeah well let me tell

01:02:18.220 you i when i arrived when i moved to ontario to do my uh uh to go back to school i woke up the

01:02:25.260 first morning and it's like why am i awake so early it's 5 30 a.m and everything is so hot and

01:02:31.100 sticky and i'm on the floor of this mostly unfurnished apartment and i turn on the cbc

01:02:36.440 and the first announcement is that there's been um a coal fire generation air inversion and people

01:02:45.900 with respiratory problems shouldn't leave the house. And I thought, oh God, this sounds bad.

01:02:53.180 And then there was an extreme heat warning stating that people with another set of health problems

01:02:59.740 shouldn't leave the house. And then they announced that Hydro One hadn't bought enough power that day

01:03:06.380 and everybody needed to turn their air conditioner off to avoid brownouts. And it's like, well,

01:03:11.460 welcome to the center of the universe exactly uh this is this is the place that canada is run from

01:03:17.880 i i don't know what to make of that i it's almost you know what i think that it was said best uh

01:03:23.500 by somebody who's actually quite left-wing a friend of mine jeff brom who said that the reason

01:03:27.680 the real reason that the fords need to be left in charge of ontario forever it's exactly what

01:03:32.180 they deserve they should be king of ontario in perpetuity well the thing is like i was living

01:03:40.920 in toronto in 2010 might have voted for rob ford in the civic election to be perfectly honest uh

01:03:47.160 given the array i mean he was up against george smitherman otherwise known as furious george

01:03:52.520 the guy who was responsible for the provincial e-health scandal where he tried to get a single

01:03:57.640 electronic patient record put together and somehow lost over a hundred million dollars uh so uh he

01:04:05.960 was up against rob ford and the thing was a lot of people on the left if they lived in the outer

01:04:10.600 communities in toronto both went out and voted for rob ford and before he was even declared elected

01:04:16.920 started organizing to save their local library because they knew he'd come for their library

01:04:21.240 and they liked their library but as much as they loved their library they hated the smug pricks of

01:04:28.600 the laurentian elite who had been running their city more and the prospect of embarrassing them

01:04:35.560 by electing rob ford was more attractive than a public library branch it uh and you really do

01:04:43.480 start to feel that way if you live in ontario like it's pretty weird to go somewhere and i'm

01:04:48.680 just this rube from the west who should not be taken seriously and they have different reasons 0.98

01:04:54.360 for not taking everybody seriously and eventually people get tired of it it's sort of like some jerk 0.99

01:05:01.000 he was parking their, you know, BMW in the garage, in your garage. And you can't really do 0.97

01:05:06.220 anything about it. The cops aren't going to help. They they're with the guy with the BMW.

01:05:10.100 The only thing you can do is burn your garage down out of spite, self-immolated.

01:05:16.480 If you kamikaze hard enough, you, you will carry the day.

01:05:20.980 Yeah. So, and also I think what Doug Ford, like if John Horgan had been handed the same set of

01:05:28.300 economic and epidemiological conditions as doug ford he would have done much worse we have to

01:05:35.980 remember that doug ford had better sick leave more proactive lockdowns did not do things like

01:05:44.200 declaring sport fishing an essential service but it is it is i'm all for survival fishing

01:05:51.220 sport fishing not essential so so so you look at the measures doug ford took it's just that he was

01:05:56.820 running a jurisdiction like New York. It was the primary airport in the country, primary migration

01:06:02.000 reception point, primary industrial center. But if John Horgan and Bonnie Henry's rules had been

01:06:08.320 enacted in Ontario, you'd see a way higher body count than Doug Ford produced, which proved to me

01:06:14.640 that fundamentally at the deepest level, your average bank robber is a lot more compassionate

01:06:22.560 than your average banker uh i feel like doug ford just was out of his depth like he had just come to

01:06:31.520 loot the province well yeah i mean like that's what he's here to do yes and he was like oh no 0.74

01:06:37.200 these people are dying oh no oh damn it and you could just you could just see it as like i think 0.89

01:06:45.280 that whole the ontario covet response is like an american heist movie where the bank robber gets 0.99

01:06:51.200 into the bank and then he discovers that nobody cares if the hostages die and then he's like oh

01:06:58.320 geez maybe i'm looking after the hostages now i don't even know i just came to rob the bank

01:07:04.320 just let me take my money i just wanted the money i didn't want things to get complicated

01:07:08.740 yeah well but this is just it like it's like i mean whatever whatever my one might say of the

01:07:14.160 fords i mean the ford family is what it is it's ford nation i mean they get to call themselves

01:07:18.540 ford nation that's a whole other thing but it but ultimately it truly i think you've hit you've hit

01:07:23.620 it on the head there like he you know he was there to kind of be a brute and a bully but even a brute

01:07:28.360 and a bully must have some kind of empathy because they know when they're not being respected so they

01:07:32.460 know how to dish out bullying whereas you go off to bonnie henry and john horgan it's like they're

01:07:37.840 on cloud whatever they're not on this planet anymore they don't care i don't think they're

01:07:42.700 even the good guys in their own story uh like i really struggle to decode those folks i'm like

01:07:50.800 normally everybody's the good guy in their own story but i think horkin's the bad guy in his

01:07:56.740 story he's not he's not good enough yet he's i don't know but like it could even be i mean he

01:08:01.980 could be a way better socialist because he's not much of a socialist he's not much of a social

01:08:06.200 democrat he he doesn't he could be he could be christy clark's you know like like older brother

01:08:13.080 if he wanted to be like he's not where's the policy differences yeah there's there's regime

01:08:17.560 continuity except in two areas and i'll give him props for those two areas he put some breaks on

01:08:26.600 on the amassing of houses in BC. He did create some small financial penalties for people who

01:08:36.580 are collecting homes as investments. And fair enough, he probably slowed down that house

01:08:43.960 appreciation a little bit. At least he did something. The other thing is that he has

01:08:49.460 undone the NDP's 1990s welfare policies. So the welfare policies that he was part of a government

01:08:56.220 that enacted in the 90s he's realized that they were horribly punitive towards poor people

01:09:01.660 and has mostly reset them to where they were under social credit so which weren't exactly

01:09:07.580 the friends of poor people and somehow the ndp did worse well actually i would argue that social

01:09:14.380 credit um i had a very you know so one of my my political mentors is george jibo who was um you

01:09:22.300 know social credits research director for 16 years and george and i were talking about like well why

01:09:29.900 was public policy so good when you had like according to the cd how institute social credit

01:09:35.820 was a disaster because the people in government had very few degrees they had very few credentials

01:09:42.220 and the businesses they owned were pretty small generally and the your two typical social credit

01:09:49.020 candidates were the guy who runs the used car lot and the guy who runs the open line show and right

01:09:55.340 every little town used to have a used car lot and an open line show and the thing is if your open

01:10:02.300 line show was going to work everybody had to call in and expect fair play whether you agreed with

01:10:08.060 them or not and like what we try to do here yeah so whether you agreed with so the open so the guy

01:10:14.780 hosting the show had to be fair to everybody in the community to keep that show running

01:10:20.380 same thing with the used car law you needed everybody to be getting their used car there

01:10:27.180 you couldn't afford to lose your indigenous customers no you couldn't afford to price

01:10:33.020 people who were unemployed out of having a beater car to get around town yeah you couldn't do that 0.93

01:10:38.620 everybody had to be able to come across that lot and while that's not socialism that's a heck of

01:10:44.700 a lot closer to socialism than um what the ndp became which is um the other party pretty much

01:10:56.060 well now now the administration now a single mother's used car the taxes she pays on it

01:11:01.260 subsidized the lawyer's leaf mobile and his tesla oh look look man i got a friend with a leaf the

01:11:08.460 people with leaves have a hard road to hoe he is he had to build uh because leaf is so one of the 0.66

01:11:16.700 things the big auto industry folks did is they're not that thrilled about getting off fossil fuels

01:11:21.580 it means a lot of redesign it means a lot of sourcing of different commodities it means

01:11:25.660 depending on supply chains that are further away so they typically chose to make really bad

01:11:34.780 electric vehicles now props to elon musk in the sense that he made good electric vehicles

01:11:40.940 but for chevy or someone it's not even your objective to make a good ev your objective is to

01:11:47.100 say we have an ev please don't too many people buy one uh because that inconveniences us and

01:11:53.660 everybody else just just weirdos retrofit all these factories and change everything and well

01:11:59.900 and also with the old leaves they the uh the chargers don't work with the more powerful

01:12:05.020 chargers they heat up and the um and you and then the car thinks it's overheated and then it shuts

01:12:11.900 down for eight hours and strands you wherever you were so anyway my friend art has designed an

01:12:16.940 adapter so that the new chargers don't destroy his leaf we're going to be testing it on the 25th

01:12:23.500 it took us 17 hours to get to vancouver in a leaf last time we're going to see how much time this

01:12:29.500 new charging adapter cuts but it's um i wouldn't go so far as to say i mean look everybody who's

01:12:37.900 in a vehicle is rolling in one kind of subsidy or another because you know where um the one

01:12:44.460 thing john horgan has done is he's increased fossil fuel subsidies to the highest they have

01:12:49.260 been in the history of british columbia so we're paying for a lot of extraction um for the fuel

01:12:57.020 it's just that the subsidy formula is different and in my view if we're going to subsidize

01:13:03.260 personal vehicles which i really question at all um then you know subsidize the ones that are

01:13:11.020 solving a problem i have no idea what the what problem the average car is solving other than

01:13:17.340 the failure of the government to provide decent mass transit uh that's mostly what our fossil

01:13:23.740 fuel subsidies subsidize well that and the corporations that extract the fossil fuels and

01:13:28.700 put the money in a sack but uh i uh bank robbers that don't need hostages they just they just

01:13:35.900 they just rob and they go yeah but i i'm much more a fan of like old tech that would address this

01:13:42.380 like light rail damn train back on the bc rail line like you don't even need to do a new thing

01:13:48.940 buy a bud car stick it on the line like it used to be before you know we paid cn to take the rail 0.95

01:13:55.900 company off our hands at a 91 subsidy so what did happen with bc rail what happened there

01:14:03.260 i've never gotten a straight answer as to what happened to bc rail well it's pretty simple um

01:14:08.060 Campbell got in on the promise of not privatizing BC Rail. Obviously, though, his party was

01:14:22.640 ideologically committed to the privatization of any profitable crown asset. This is the idiocy 1.00

01:14:29.080 of privatization. Nobody sells off a part of a government that isn't making the government money. 0.98

01:14:34.860 Why? Because you couldn't sell it. No one would buy it. So the only parts of the government you

01:14:39.900 can sell off in a privatization deal are parts that are bringing cash in and replacing tax

01:14:46.860 dollars. So you sell off BC Rail or some other asset. It's like selling the furniture to pay

01:14:54.620 the mortgage. It's a very silly financial move. So the liberals were constrained. They couldn't 0.88

01:15:00.780 just sell it so of course they came up with the idea of the 1 000 year lease 1 000 years yes well

01:15:08.140 999 and 364 days i think technically so they then went out there and said all right who wants to

01:15:16.620 have us see i have the old bc rail line for a thousand years and uh now the assessed value of

01:15:25.180 the line uh they have some estimations on the second coming of christ i guess yeah

01:15:31.580 so the so so the estimated cost of the line was um the estimated value was 1.1 billion

01:15:39.900 so they sold it for 90 million uh or 900 90 million and uh so huge huge discount justified

01:15:51.180 how well we're not really selling it we still own it we've only lent it to somebody for a thousand

01:15:56.140 years so uh so then omni tracks and cn get into a competition uh for that and um at this point

01:16:07.820 folks in the bureaucracy um are it's pretty clear that there's a lot of self-dealing going on and

01:16:18.140 And there's a lot of explaining to do about the sale.

01:16:22.660 And Kevin Falcon, Gary Collins, all kinds of fairly high-level people look as though they might be implicated.

01:16:32.440 But fortunately, there were two low-level officials who had leaked information to the losing bid.

01:16:41.080 So Bassey and Virk ended up doing time for leaking information to Omnitracks.

01:16:50.860 Nobody has ever really investigated the CN sale and how the decisions were made, how Collins and others were involved.

01:17:00.060 and one of the things i thought the ndp would do given that they've created the cullen commission

01:17:07.360 and whatnot would be there's they used to be big fans of there being public assets it's like well

01:17:14.380 look this sale was so screwed up people did time um maybe we should look into that surely

01:17:20.860 surely we might have some legal standing to get the line back given that it was sold off in such

01:17:29.560 a greasy way. But that was ruled out. As soon as the party took office, they were worried

01:17:36.300 about another Capitol strike. And so we also have to look at the Cullen Commission in this context.

01:17:43.380 We think that this is about the government going after criminal wrongdoing in the Solicitor General's

01:17:50.620 office under Rich Coleman, shielding casinos from money laundering investigations.

01:17:57.160 let's remember though that um the point of the cullen commission and of commissions generally

01:18:05.840 like people have this a lot of people on the left like truth and reconciliation commissions

01:18:10.120 because they don't know what they are what they're for what these commissions are for typically

01:18:14.960 is legally immunizing people so they can testify before the commission the commission's primary

01:18:22.300 function in a situation like this is to shield people from criminal penalties in exchange for

01:18:29.640 telling the truth. That's how government commissions work. So if you actually think

01:18:34.760 there have been a bunch of crimes and a bunch of people should be punished, you want to hand that

01:18:40.540 to a special prosecutor and the cops. You don't want to hand it to a commission. But I think one

01:18:48.740 the reasons for this is we've got to remember who's joe so john horgan's chief of staff jeff

01:18:54.660 megs right they were both officials in the glenn clark government um both uh you know horgan was

01:19:01.300 a lifelong new democrat uh megs had spent most of his life as a communist party of canada organizer

01:19:07.140 it's important though to understand that the communist party of canada

01:19:11.300 for the whole duration of the cold war was just a dodgy scheme for getting beach vacations

01:19:16.420 uh so it was just that people couldn't afford a vacation and you get a free one in cuba or the

01:19:23.540 ukraine at the beach if um you were a high enough level communist so uh that sounds like a pretty

01:19:30.020 good reason to join does that still carry today for cuba extent um actually well the problem is

01:19:34.820 they've got worse holiday destinations although when the mark um and of course there are two

01:19:39.220 different parties handing out the holidays so the communist party can hand out cuban holidays

01:19:44.820 um and you know they used to be able to hand out ukrainian and russian holidays obviously they

01:19:50.620 couldn't do that anymore but then the other party the marxist leninist party they were the people

01:19:55.780 who sided with china but then when the nixon went to china they decided they were the albania party

01:20:02.020 which is was crazy except that until you've been to an albanian beach uh the beaches in albania

01:20:10.840 are bloody incredible. It's the Mediterranean. Yes, but sadly, the regime in Albania has fallen

01:20:16.660 now, and the Marxist-Leninists were quite hard up until Robert Mugabe went totally crazy.

01:20:23.580 And now you can go on safaris to Victoria Falls if you're a Marxist-Leninist. So anyway,

01:20:31.100 reasons to join. Long digression. But Jeff Meigs and John Horgan, right, 2001, they're out on their

01:20:38.060 year. They're not in government anymore. So Megs becomes associated with Larry Campbell,

01:20:47.720 the former coroner, former senior police officer, very popular, and he becomes the chief of staff

01:20:56.500 of Larry Campbell when he's mayor of Vancouver. And one of the first things he does is he starts

01:21:02.180 helping out his old pal, John Horgan, who is what at this point? A lobbyist for the casino industry.

01:21:08.780 Interesting. So Horgan and Megs cook up this plan for a waterfront casino. And it's great because

01:21:16.660 Megs gives a speech to the annual general meeting of the Coalition of Progressive Electors,

01:21:21.240 explaining that we have to have a waterfront casino because of the false consciousness of

01:21:25.660 the working class uh so you know no don't say communism was good for nothing beach vacations

01:21:32.480 and casino promotion so meg's um and now larry campbell remains um and so larry campbell is the

01:21:43.420 primary point of contact for horgan's business and it's larry campbell's uh larry campbell sits

01:21:52.580 on the board of the great canadian casino it's larry campbell's casino that did most of the

01:21:57.920 money laundering and so it's you sort of wonder the ndp might have any number of reasons to want

01:22:08.880 to immunize people from prosecution in exchange for their testimony because nobody has the real

01:22:15.440 story of how megs horgan and campbell fit together we just know that larry campbell

01:22:21.800 although he's a senator, doesn't feel particularly obliged to testify or cooperate with the police.

01:22:28.440 Interesting.

01:22:28.880 So and it's also a great example of new Democrats and liberals working together.

01:22:33.600 Yeah, exactly.

01:22:34.380 And one one party, one one opposition, the people, one group of people to punish.

01:22:41.060 I think I think what's interesting with all that is is is precisely that one thing that queued up for me was a lobbyist for the casino industry.

01:22:50.120 it's like it's like being a lobbyist for tobacco like doesn't it just sell itself like who do you

01:22:54.780 need a lobbyist for these things anymore it's like i'm here to help the government make a

01:22:58.760 ridiculous amount of revenue off of the least of these and to enslave people so why don't you just

01:23:04.600 give me my golden paycheck already and i'll walk oh yeah what do you have to sell no it's quite

01:23:11.560 funny there was a great line in trailer park boys where uh julian's saying to ricky is dead

01:23:17.320 Ray, stop going to the video lottery terminals. It's like, hey, you know, Julian, the Lord made

01:23:24.120 the video lottery terminals. He made all of creation. He says, look, that's not what's

01:23:30.560 going on here. The government put those video lottery terminals at the bar because they don't

01:23:36.300 like giving out welfare checks and they want the money back. And that's about the size of it,

01:23:42.140 right? These governments conceptualize these things as cost recovery measures. But we actually

01:23:47.820 did in the 90s have something called a gambling expansion strategy. And when I was running in the

01:23:53.400 White Rock by-election in 97, I said, well, should we have an alcohol expansion strategy too?

01:23:59.380 Like, why stop there? Now, the supposed justification for government casinos and

01:24:08.240 government uh vlt um is that we're preventing people from going to vegas this is a very

01:24:19.200 no they didn't really write that down yeah absolutely this is the same logic as pipelines

01:24:25.360 so so this is going to get ugly okay okay so the the supply basically their idea is that the laws

01:24:34.080 of supply and demand don't apply to gambling that there's a finite amount of gambling the

01:24:40.240 population of british columbia will do and no matter how much you increase or reduce the

01:24:45.840 number of casinos the ease of getting to them the um you know proximity of bars to the casinos all

01:24:54.000 that stuff that we're just going to gamble exactly the same amount no matter what and then it's just

01:25:00.640 just a matter of, well, we should get our share. The more casinos, the more VLTs we put here,

01:25:07.020 the less money will go to Vegas. Now, we all know that the laws of supply and demand are real,

01:25:14.880 that if you reduce the difficulty of doing a thing, and if you increase the supply of that

01:25:22.400 thing, more of it will be consumed. Now, let's think about the rhetoric we're using to sell LNG.

01:25:33.140 China will consume exactly the same amount of energy no matter what. It doesn't matter how

01:25:38.460 much you increase the supply of fossil fuels, it will be flat. So we're just replacing dirty coal

01:25:44.360 with clean LNG. There's no way more natural gas will be consumed just because there's twice as

01:25:50.800 much of it on the market and the price has collapsed. That's nonsense. We all know you put

01:25:57.580 more stuff out there cheaper, more of it's going to get consumed. Adam Smith has never been proven

01:26:04.440 wrong on that point. Even Mark said so. Yeah, that's just common sense. But you can see how

01:26:12.920 Horgan could easily slip into the rhetoric of we're replacing coal with a clean energy source

01:26:19.100 because he'd already been hawking the same logic.

01:26:23.520 Now, of course, you can't actually measure flights to Vegas from a jurisdiction.

01:26:27.260 So we know that these arguments are completely false,

01:26:30.280 that the more gambling you put in a jurisdiction,

01:26:33.760 the more flights to Vegas there are per month.

01:26:36.780 Because you get a taste for a casino.

01:26:39.860 Don't you want to go to a really nice one or at least a really weird one?

01:26:44.500 You know, the strip in Vegas is great.

01:26:47.440 uh so you um you habituate people to gambling then they see an activity that they can center

01:26:54.620 that holiday on so the reality is of course and the reason people like horgan made money in his

01:27:00.340 old line of work is that everyone in the gambling industry does better if you create more gambling

01:27:07.420 opportunities anywhere it truly is a rising tide lifting all boats except of course the finances

01:27:15.540 of the people who are gaming yep no that makes sense that's a very socially conservative

01:27:20.500 argument story that's extremely socially because that's basically the same argument that's made 1.00

01:27:24.420 about pornography absolutely um well this is why we're seeing all kinds of feminist organizations

01:27:32.560 working for boris johnson's tories right uh this is a very strange moment when um the left has got

01:27:41.160 so crazy that um you know people like me and like the head of rape relief are being slowly pushed

01:27:49.900 onto the conservative side just by the sheer insanity of what's going on elsewhere fortunately

01:27:56.580 there's enough insanity on the conservative side we can you know we can still keep ricocheting back

01:28:01.880 and forth exactly it's like it's like you know i one of the things you had just written about in

01:28:06.380 your blog i think there's something that would be good for the viewers to kind of understand a bit

01:28:10.560 This idea of how what what went wrong with the left in the sense of harassment policy and how that broke down solidarity.

01:28:18.780 Maybe maybe we can walk through what even solidarity is first a little bit and then we'll get to what's going on there.

01:28:23.800 Sure. Well, let me start with the starting point.

01:28:25.880 The fact that it was two weeks ago on this show that I had the conversation that made me write my latest blog post talking with Aaron Ackman.

01:28:34.480 And there was this piece of a puzzle that I had been missing for a long time.

01:28:40.560 And it had to do with the fact that it was primarily employers and not trade unions that came to the bargaining table with these beefed up anti-bullying, anti-bigotry, anti-harassment policies.

01:28:58.800 And that trade unions looked at these policies pretty uncritically and went, well, this sort of looks like the anti-racism campaign we're out doing in the public square.

01:29:07.920 So why not have something like this at work?

01:29:10.180 and signed off with very little thought about it. But in fact, the negotiators for these

01:29:18.360 corporations are actually far smarter and thinking a longer game than the union negotiators they were

01:29:25.460 up against. Because the central problem of capitalism since the fall of the Soviet Union

01:29:32.840 has been to get it back onto the track that it was on before the rise of the Soviet Union,

01:29:38.720 where you have a huge gap between rich and poor, workers have very few rights, everything's being

01:29:44.520 paid for on installment plans, and the economy is largely deregulated. Now, that's what makes

01:29:53.120 profits, right? The more you can skim off and send to investors, the better your business is running.

01:30:00.220 And so following the collapse of the Soviet Union, we went through this process called austerity,

01:30:05.780 where both the private and public sector, when we need to shed employees, we need to become more

01:30:13.560 efficient. How are we going to do that? And also, how do we get rid of these union protections of

01:30:21.880 job security? How do we get to the point where we have at-will employment again and a right-to-work

01:30:29.360 environment yeah exempt employees yeah so this how do you facilitate that well one of the ways to do

01:30:37.680 that is to start educating workers about um you both educate and i use educate uh advisedly

01:30:50.640 you're educating workers uh supposedly about the evils of racism the evils of sexism the evils of

01:30:57.440 bullying but what you're really doing is you're the companies that come in and do this and they're

01:31:04.000 a whole industry um their methodology is not based on any recognizable pedagogy or educational

01:31:13.120 principles it's from 1970s cults like the est movement becoming the landmark forum so what you

01:31:20.560 do what you do is you accuse everybody in the room of being a racist you make everybody feel bad and

01:31:26.160 And then you have these personal confessions like Maoist self-criticism, except, of course, they're much more common in cults like Scientology, Landmark Forum, Est, et cetera.

01:31:39.860 Somebody gets up, they cry.

01:31:41.460 You destroy their ego in front of the group, and then you rebuild their ego in the context of the group.

01:31:48.200 And the person goes, I am going to be different now, blah, blah, blah.

01:31:51.180 Now, of course, that's corrosive to solidarity.

01:31:54.600 of course, it makes people more focused on their work environment. But the other thing is,

01:32:01.020 these policies are not about people abusing their rank at work. It's not like we have a policy

01:32:08.120 against harassment, and you can use the fact that you're of a lower rank as grounds for why you're

01:32:15.000 being harassed. No, being of a lower class or a lower rank is not a legit reason to file a

01:32:21.740 complaint. What's a legit reason? And it's interesting how it's expressed is if you feel

01:32:28.180 that you're the subject of racism, if you feel you're the subject of sexism, if you feel you're

01:32:33.880 the subject of transphobia or homophobia. Now, what that does is it de-links your complaint

01:32:41.660 from any available evidence. So if you actually are, if you can show all these instances where

01:32:49.720 were called a racist name or something and there's like a paper trail that doesn't really make much

01:32:54.920 difference because it's not about what's happened it's about how you feel and similarly if you can't

01:33:03.160 find any evidence but you have some very strong feelings that can count and so what these complaint

01:33:10.840 processes really are is a measure of how much social capital you have at work and how many

01:33:16.280 friends you have at work. And you also have to look at, well, who do complaints get lodged

01:33:21.820 against? Well, they don't tend to get lodged against one superior because your superior

01:33:26.580 has all of these new powers to punish you as corporations get more hierarchical. They have

01:33:33.440 more managers. There's more surveillance. More people are watching you. So successful complaints

01:33:39.440 tend to be directed against someone of equal or lower rank. You can only punch down. You could

01:33:44.620 only punch down or across. And the consequences are obvious. People who lack social capital at

01:33:53.480 work because they don't fit in, they're the people who are most likely to be targeted successfully

01:34:00.920 in processes like this. Now, this has become married to the internet. And so one of the

01:34:09.540 things that these policies typically don't do is they don't stipulate that you can only complain

01:34:14.720 about people's activities at work. The fact that they exist at work and might do something you

01:34:21.000 don't like outside of work becomes a grounds for you feeling like they're oppressing you,

01:34:27.840 feeling like they're being bigoted towards you. And so what this means is that effectively,

01:34:34.800 everybody now has a morals clause in their contract that they have to engage in non-controversial

01:34:43.340 speech outside of work, or they may be the victim of workplace discipline. And, you know, this was,

01:34:51.500 um, this is spelled out to me pretty directly in my own recent interactions with a former employer.

01:34:59.080 uh there's this moment of um saying well but you know dr parker was ill dr parker uh you know you

01:35:07.740 asked for all this medical documentation here it all is it's like and the employer says well it's

01:35:11.580 not really about that actually it's about what he says on twitter uh and what's interesting is that

01:35:18.340 in that process um while my employer is trying to get rid of me because they don't like their

01:35:23.620 my political opinions the big social justice activist of campus immediately joins in attacking

01:35:32.660 me you know and echoing the employer's accusations against me that i'm misogynist that i'm sexist

01:35:39.460 blah blah blah and what's going on in this guy's mind is that he's being a social justice warrior

01:35:46.420 he is doing the work of equity by chasing an evil misogynist out of the workplace

01:35:52.580 but of course 100 years ago he wouldn't have been called social justice warrior he would have been

01:35:57.200 called a snitch or a scab because what he's doing is volunteer work for the boss to help someone

01:36:05.860 else get fired and of course this is the genius of how the human resources industry has turned

01:36:16.740 the woke left into its weapons what are the main demands what were the main demands right against

01:36:23.280 harvey weinstein that harvey weinstein be fired right those are the big demands that tend to get

01:36:30.000 made uh when uh in this sort of cancel culture moment the idea is that now mia kirschner a

01:36:39.240 brilliant canadian actress wrote a piece rebutting all that during the harvey weinstein me too moment

01:36:45.040 She said, well, this isn't going to help anyone. There's just going to be another Harvey Weinstein in that position. What you want is for the Screen Actors Guild to prohibit people holding meetings in hotel rooms, people signing contracts without physical supervision.

01:37:00.620 uh we need proper labor standards where sag negotiates um uh we need to get rid of this

01:37:08.500 two-tiered membership in the union where all the extras have no voting rights and she enumerated 1.00

01:37:14.140 all these structural changes that could prevent women from being sexually victimized in hollywood

01:37:19.420 but those things went nowhere i think sarah polly agreed with them because i think they're like

01:37:24.520 neighbors in toronto but that was it everybody else is like fire weinstein fire spacey find these

01:37:31.960 individual guys and chase them out of work which also reveals a really ugly assumption because

01:37:38.120 you know i've said to the people who are after me well where am i supposed to work now well you're

01:37:45.240 not supposed to work well where am i supposed to live you're not supposed to live anywhere

01:37:48.680 uh we'll give you a sign it says unclean yeah but actually what it means is and and of course

01:37:56.260 they you know uh these folks they go after your friends they tell your friends not to associate

01:38:01.280 with you they um you know uh and this is all about yeah they go after your family and this is all

01:38:07.940 supposedly about social justice but their actual belief is that you don't deserve to live if you

01:38:15.780 think the wrong thoughts that the plan is not for you to be alive if you think the wrong thoughts

01:38:22.260 and this has come to replace what we used to call solidarity which was that even if somebody is a

01:38:29.940 dick at work you stick up for them because you all have the same boss and you all collectively have

01:38:35.860 the same interests and you don't have to like the people who you share interests with you can be 0.94

01:38:41.140 annoyed by the fact that they leave work early and you have to cover for them. But at the end of

01:38:46.060 the day, solidarity is a culture of shoring other people up, putting forward a common front,

01:38:53.260 strengthening your workplace, making it a workplace where, yeah, there are still problems,

01:39:00.820 but you're not in an environment where you wonder who is listening to your conversation,

01:39:07.800 whether people are reading what you've said online whether people know that you have a reddit account

01:39:14.140 because if you've got a bunch of people and even if they all vote to go on strike together

01:39:19.940 they are not going to stick together when things get tough in the negotiations if they're all spying

01:39:26.020 on each other and reporting each other and we've turned these forms of surveillance from a moral

01:39:32.780 failure into the very essence of social justice and uh it's an amazing parlor trick and a lot of

01:39:40.640 people you know they blame the post-modernists or they they blame the communists and all that

01:39:46.140 nonsense the communists just wanted their beach vacations all the communists are trying to do is

01:39:51.260 go to the beach all the post-modernists are trying to do is have like a contest to see

01:39:56.320 how many words you can write before you get to a verb like the these are like small things that

01:40:01.800 people are doing at universities or in social clubs. The people who've created our so-called

01:40:07.700 cancel culture moment, or what I prefer to call our neo-McCarthyism moment, are big HR. They're

01:40:15.280 the people who expanded MBA programs in the 80s, 90s, and aughts. The people who created the

01:40:22.420 executive mba um these are the folks who are doing your uh workplace anti-racism training

01:40:32.140 also which is kind of inconvenient because they don't actually know anything about race or racism

01:40:39.860 because they haven't studied it they're not usually from an unprivileged class either

01:40:44.440 And that's the other thing about MBAs, right? Back when you hired specialized managers out of a bachelor's of business or a bachelor's of commerce, that's four years of full-time training.

01:41:01.120 So if you had to have someone who was specialized in management, that used to be the degree.

01:41:05.980 What's an MBA?

01:41:07.320 It's eight months of part-time training.

01:41:10.900 And, but the tuition fees for an MBA are going to be the same or larger as for the four-year program in commerce.

01:41:19.220 So what you're doing is you're simply creating a financial gatekeeping function where a bunch of money goes into a university and a bunch of credentials come out the other end.

01:41:29.960 Where are people actually learning their stuff? Well, it's like a mixture of like pop psychology, the seven habits of highly effective people, things like that. And so the other thing is that we've gone from anti-racism being in a reasonably intelligent discourse to a discourse that is dominated by a bunch of HR professionals who don't know anything about this subject.

01:41:56.320 Now, the other thing that we started seeing, though, are organizations like the one that went after those yoga studios in Boulder, Colorado.

01:42:06.940 I don't know whether you're aware of this, but there were a group of people who were doing anti-racism training, but they were also a movement that put on anti-racism protests.

01:42:18.000 And so it was a real carrot stick thing.

01:42:21.060 So do you want to buy some anti-racism training?

01:42:23.940 are you sure because if you don't want to buy this product from us we'll put on a protest and

01:42:29.860 organize a boycott and we will take you down um that's called extortion that is it's also um you 0.53

01:42:37.040 know this is why uh black lives matter vancouver was expelled from the black lives matter movement

01:42:42.220 the chicago and new york blm chapters just uh severed ties with vancouver because it's actually

01:42:49.260 mainly a theater ticket scalping business uh if there's a black entertainer coming to town

01:42:55.400 um bl in vancouver approaches your venue and says um we're going to tell this person not to come 0.58

01:43:02.440 because you're a racist organization um unless we get these dress circle tickets that we then resell

01:43:09.900 so uh and this is catastrophic right mainly for people who have to deal with racism in their daily

01:43:17.620 lives. I was just reading the statistics. Unlike most racialized people, indigenous women,

01:43:25.580 96% of indigenous women who have been sexually assaulted have been sexually assaulted by a 0.89

01:43:31.660 non-indigenous person, right? Like that is an incredibly clear statistical piece of information

01:43:39.080 that this society has serious problems with racism. And the discourse about the racism that

01:43:46.720 we're dealing with in this society has been hijacked by big HR to make people's jobs less

01:43:52.680 secure rather than to fight racism. And all kinds of well-intentioned chumps have been taken in

01:43:59.300 and are working to drive me out of employment, drive Aaron Ackman out of employment, drive

01:44:05.120 whoever out of employment, instead of thinking about what can we do to actually address the

01:44:14.440 significant issues of racism in our society that is literally killing our neighbors it's it's a

01:44:21.580 profound statement but not one i can disagree with i think it's important that people hear it

01:44:25.480 something something that kind of bridges that gap a little bit i think steward is that recently

01:44:30.160 it was discussed it was mentioned somewhere that that perhaps to solve some of the problems we're

01:44:35.000 seeing in the armed forces in canada especially when it comes to sexual assault and that sort of

01:44:39.060 thing um is is that they should have a union and i sat there and i was kind of like oh that's

01:44:44.620 interesting because i mean one wouldn't think of of rankers having a union being a very good way

01:44:49.000 to fight a war but then again you have to look back to the civil war in spain and the anarchists

01:44:54.300 managed to put up a pretty good fight without having any proper ranks i mean orwell documents

01:44:58.460 that pretty well and you can also do it in you don't have to turn the army into a co-op which

01:45:04.080 is what's going on in Kurdistan, what was going on in Spain. You don't have to turn the army into an

01:45:10.000 anarchist co-op. We're not even saying the officers have to join the union. The point is

01:45:15.080 that the folks on the bottom have some kind of collective representation. And in many ways,

01:45:24.020 I think American voting patterns have gotten out right ahead of that. One of the things that I

01:45:28.640 found most interesting was it used to be that you could rely on people at all ranks in the u.s army

01:45:35.900 to back the republicans as the national security party and then a really interesting thing happened

01:45:42.880 the ron paul presidential bids now ron paul's an ambivalent figure right i really disagree with

01:45:49.680 him on a bunch of stuff but ron paul sought the republican nomination on a ticket of letting you

01:45:56.580 come home. And a huge swing took place amongst, not the officer class, but the regular enlisted

01:46:06.180 men. And they were the only, these bases on foreign soil were the only places that Ron Paul

01:46:14.220 swept in his presidential bids. And ironically, the person who inherited those voters was Bernie

01:46:20.140 Sanders, that Ron Paul ended up functioning as this conduit from a group of people who thought

01:46:29.940 the officers were looking after them, thought their party was looking after them, to a group

01:46:34.040 of people who were very strategically making radical voting decisions in a fairly cohesive

01:46:41.840 way. This isn't the story of the fragmentation of the military vote. This is the story of the

01:46:48.420 fragmentation of the U.S. military vote becoming more self-conscious and more sophisticated.

01:46:54.580 And that's something that, you know, Scott Koston, who advocated for this, he comes out of the

01:47:02.200 Canadian forces, he says the Canadian forces are ready for that. The problem is that we need to

01:47:08.460 find different institutional mechanisms to galvanize the folks enlisted in the army. Because

01:47:14.520 Again, if you want a story about race and being alive, the disproportionate representation of Indigenous, but especially Métis people at the rank of private is huge.

01:47:28.700 uh and um we really have to think about um uh how decisions are made for those folks and how

01:47:38.700 their interests diverge from the officers interests or from the strategic interests of

01:47:44.460 the state so it's not something that one can induce from outside the military but i think it

01:47:52.420 would be my hope is that the parts of the canadian trade union movement that aren't completely

01:47:58.340 useless, will get behind and put real resources into a rank-and-file-led effort in the Canadian

01:48:09.860 forces. And I think we'll see, it'll be very interesting to see what the grievances and

01:48:16.260 priorities are, how much this focuses on veterans' care, how much this focuses on questions of

01:48:22.420 promotion and race there's a lot to unpack there and it's unfortunate that um the trade union

01:48:31.880 movement often feels so beholden to the anti-war movement that it's tough to ask those questions

01:48:38.180 and it's tough to send those organizers that is that is a difficult uh interesting complication

01:48:43.720 one of the one maybe the last thing to touch on here with this whole idea is is is that when it

01:48:49.060 comes to the military the military just like other institutions used to be a way of people from the

01:48:54.280 lower classes making their way into upper classes or at least finding some kind of equity and maybe

01:48:58.720 that's something else that's changed but it's interesting too because it's not as if different

01:49:02.860 races or different cultures weren't mixed in the military before case in point being i mean the

01:49:07.360 english were very happy to bring the scottish into their ranks that's how they took quebec

01:49:10.780 and if we look at america i mean despite only having what less than 25 of the population most

01:49:16.400 of the rankers and most a lot of a lot of the u.s military comes from the southern united states

01:49:21.360 which still has an honor-based culture so what has gone wrong here and i mean i think it's the

01:49:25.960 same thing in canada i think there is very much an honor-based culture inside of aboriginal and

01:49:30.740 metis organization so that's being funneled into the military to help bolster it what what is going

01:49:36.600 on why why isn't that resulting in those old ways of the institution leveling people up

01:49:41.820 Yeah, I think that one of the problems is stigma. I think that a lot of folks, that there isn't this sense in white collar employment that people who've come up through the military are people whose organizational skills, their morality, all of these things have been forged in the military.

01:50:08.220 Instead, we go, well, this person had to serve in the military, so there's already something wrong.

01:50:13.440 We also really overdo it when we talk about trauma.

01:50:17.400 Now, I'm not saying that our veterans hospital system treats trauma as well as it should,

01:50:22.400 but we often imagine people who've done military service as permanently damaged and as like damaged goods that you shouldn't handle.

01:50:32.780 And I think it's really great that we've raised awareness about post-traumatic stress disorder and things like that and disabilities that you do get from being in the military.

01:50:43.800 But I think what's happened now is there's a stigma in terms of, well, you either served in the military because you're a chump or you have bad politics.

01:50:54.960 And on top of that, you probably have a whole bunch of mental illnesses I don't want to see. 0.96

01:50:59.500 and uh that of course is um and you know it's funny there are we think that the left has a

01:51:09.060 big sensitivity culture and certainly we're very sensitive about certain things but

01:51:14.600 veterans are one of the groups that you can just disparage that you can just look down your nose

01:51:21.600 at that you can just say mean things about with no consequences nobody's gonna stick up for a

01:51:27.020 veterans' feelings in the left any more than they're going to stick up for the feelings of

01:51:31.900 someone who says, I'm born again in Jesus Christ, right? We love people getting to pick their

01:51:38.020 identity unless they pick that one. And we love stories of resilience unless resilience involves

01:51:45.020 clawing your way up through the military to make something of yourself. So I think that a lot of

01:51:52.620 white collar employment turns up their nose, you know, and right now I'm watching Mad Men with

01:51:59.020 my partner and her daughter. And there was, there's a scene in Mad Men where they're watching

01:52:06.860 a Western. And I realized that we are as far in time from Mad Men as they were from the Western

01:52:12.400 they're watching in the show. That's right. And, but we, you think back to that era and you think

01:52:18.640 of the fact that this is what demobilization looked like. It looked like veterans coming

01:52:28.720 and taking jobs and being accommodated for the fact that they were traumatized. You see that

01:52:34.380 all through Mad Men. You see a lot of excuse making, both good and bad, for the veterans.

01:52:40.040 But you also see tremendous respect for the skills they acquired and what they achieved.

01:52:46.100 and it's really the 1960s by the time you're at the end of the 1960s liberal society's idea of

01:52:52.580 respecting veterans disappears and it really saddened me one of the most saddening things

01:52:59.040 for me about the trump movement was seeing the right adopt that same scorn hearing donald trump

01:53:06.720 mocking um you can there's a lot to mock about john mccain but the fact that he spent time in

01:53:12.640 prisoner of war camp is sure as hell not it the idea that mccain was a chump for having served 0.97

01:53:19.520 the idea that you know he was dumb for having been captured that he was 0.94

01:53:26.640 unintelligent and not selling out his guys when he was in the camp it's really disappointing stuff 0.81

01:53:33.600 and it's really sad to see that that scorn that incubated in the left-wing anti-war movement

01:53:40.640 is now spreading through all parts of society including among people i never thought would

01:53:46.880 have that kind of disrespect for um people's military service you know my um my partner's

01:53:55.840 ex uh he served in kosovo and you know i'm obviously you know the kids know what kind

01:54:04.480 of person i am and you know the fact that you know i've been to my share of peace marches and

01:54:10.400 blah blah blah and i said i want to make really clear here that your father deciding to serve in

01:54:16.720 kosovo um is was a service to me it was a service to all people kosovo if there is any war that we

01:54:26.880 can call a good war after the second world war it is the fight to protect those muslim civilians

01:54:34.240 in kosovo and in bosnia and yet people don't think about that the anti-war movement went

01:54:42.400 out and protested kosovo uh just like everything else and i think it's really unfortunate that um

01:54:51.920 we're not thinking we also don't ask questions about what specifically did you do in the forces

01:54:57.040 oh you had a quartermaster's spot oh really so you're a bookkeeper you're an accountant you can

01:55:01.680 do all these people you know they stop asking questions when they hear military service rather

01:55:07.600 than that being an opener to questions so i think that we uh and all and you know the number one

01:55:15.920 reason this is not as true in canada but it's more true than you think number one reason given for

01:55:21.920 people enlisting in the u.s army is to have medical coverage for their wife's first pregnancy

01:55:27.200 There are not just good foreign motivations to join the forces. There are good domestic motivations to join, to lift your family out of poverty, to provide them with new housing, these sorts of things.

01:55:42.940 and uh yeah i think we're we're at an unfortunate moment when we lose the ability to respect that

01:55:51.120 because it goes back to this larger question we keep asking about the efforts to assert ourselves

01:55:57.980 as a people in western canada you need a big coalition you need to welcome everyone in and

01:56:05.180 especially in rural racialized communities, especially in Métis communities, that has to

01:56:14.100 mean honoring our veterans in a different and more substantive way. I completely agree. Well,

01:56:19.960 we have come to the end of our time. It was a little bit different today. Obviously, we had an

01:56:23.920 in-house guest. It's been a little while since we've done that. I think the last time we did

01:56:27.100 that, Sean Olick was on stand, but that's okay. And thank you for your patience with us. And

01:56:32.120 Thank you for letting us rearrange things during that one little minute we took there.

01:56:36.260 But I just want to say thank you so much, Stuart, for being here.

01:56:38.660 It's always an honor to have you on the show, and we just love having you here.

01:56:41.820 Well, thanks so much.

01:56:43.040 I finally feel like I'm talking to the people that I should have been talking to all along.

01:56:47.620 Oh, there you go.

01:56:48.420 That's perfect.

01:56:49.460 Well, that's our show for this week.

01:56:51.400 And, of course, we'll be back on Tuesday, 9 a.m. Pacific, 10 a.m. Mountain.

01:56:56.460 And we'll be bringing on some more guests.

01:56:58.140 We'll be announcing those through the weekend.

01:56:59.620 Again, thank you for tuning in.

01:57:01.080 and this has been Mountain Standard Time.

Western Standard - May 14, 2021

Mountain Standard Time - May 13 2021

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