00:22:30.440And you saw that even earlier this week in Charlottetown, PEI, where they passed this motion.
00:22:41.980They 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.
00:22:53.980He was the architect of residential, like just bought into the narrative completely.
00:27:20.340Does that have to do with our narrative lacking?
00:27:23.460We're seeing this now even with the United States,
00:27:25.380and they had a gas shortage on the East Coast,
00:27:27.160but they're also talking about shutting down Line 5 to the East Coast,
00:27:31.060though admittedly a lot of Western sovereignists who watch this channel
00:27:34.020probably be pretty happy about that for a little while
00:27:36.760and let them eat it for a little while.
00:27:38.560But 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?
00:27:47.680Well, 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.
00:28:00.120for the last 50 years at least um and that lack of political leadership i think has led to a lot
00:28:07.760of the problems we have i mean look we're always going to have problems telling our own story
00:28:12.060in the age of of the 24 7 news cycle and the internet when we're living next door to the
00:28:17.140united states which is a cultural behemoth um and you know both speaking the same language and
00:28:22.520having similar um similar historical roots in in great britain uh but we haven't done a good job
00:28:29.960of telling our story, about how we're differentiated from the United States, about how our paths
00:28:33.880diverged, obviously, significantly in the 1700s and through the 1800s, and, you know, the historical
00:28:40.980realities that we can be proud of, whether it's the first, the two world wars, or whether it's how
00:28:46.260we dealt with Indigenous people. In fact, that's another thing, is like, if you look at what
00:28:51.220happened in Australia and the United States, or really almost anywhere else in the world,
00:28:55.200We should actually be proud about how we work with Indigenous people.
00:41:17.660It's and it's more inhuman than any other theocracy, almost on planet Earth, except for maybe Iran.
00:41:22.200and and the fact of the matter is that it just it doesn't it doesn't appeal to human people
00:41:26.660human beings on a human level and to people on a people level and and finally with what what's
00:41:31.820going on with the federal carbon tax and even the question of of the pipeline especially line five
00:41:36.300out of out of michigan there and everything it what like what are we doing like we we know that
00:41:42.060we need energy this is a cold place we need energy even victoria gets cold it gets you know a couple
00:41:48.160of snowfalls a year everybody forgets how to drive it's a bit of a crazy time but like we need energy
00:41:53.960we must have energy and until we get until we get to that green future whatever that's going to look
00:41:58.940like god knows how much that would cost and what kind of raw materials and and rare minerals it
00:42:03.180would take like why do people think that we could just somehow switch off the the taps or turn off
00:42:08.100the lights like it's that's not how it works 100 and and uh i mean those that think we're going to
00:42:14.860solve climate change by taxing Canadians into taking the bus are woefully misinformed and are
00:42:22.620going to be incredibly disappointed as China continues to build new coal power plants every
00:42:28.840week. Yeah, I think that it doesn't make a lot of sense. I think it makes a lot of people feel
00:42:36.740good about themselves, that they're doing something. Because as you said, when you look
00:42:40.220the statistics and you look at the facts it's not it's not doing anything and um as you said
00:42:46.460and i want to make another point because you just mentioned that we need the energy right like it's
00:42:50.140it's cold here people need there's going to be cars powered by gasoline for decades into the
00:42:56.060future it's just it's just uh just how it is but the other thing is that the world is going to
00:43:02.860continue to need this energy so there's the one question about ourselves there's the second
00:43:07.260question that I think is even more obvious, believe it or not, which is that as long as
00:43:10.860the world needs energy, the natural follow-up question is going to be, where do we want the
00:43:15.320energy to come from? Do we want it to come from Russia? Do we want it to come from Iran? Do we
00:43:21.160want it to come from Venezuela? Or do we want it to come from Canada, where we have the best
00:43:27.120environmental regulations in the world, where we plow a lot of that money back into healthcare and
00:43:31.560education where we have human rights high paying quality jobs um and a resource that's only going
00:43:40.500to be around for so long mathematically speaking so i think it's it should be a no-brainer i mean
00:43:46.560the trans mountain expansion pipeline is finally almost complete because the government bought it's
00:43:52.400going to be hilariously over budget i mean we're going to be the only only the government could
00:43:56.040lose money on an oil pipeline but they're going to find a way exactly exactly but they'll find a
00:44:03.040way to do it uh just watch but you know when justin trudeau i don't know if you remember this
00:44:07.900when he made that decision to say okay well we're going to let trans mountain proceed or we're going
00:44:11.980to cancel northern gateway even though it got all the environmental permits uh past the nebs
00:44:17.340regulations everything was sound built being built by enbridge which is a world-class company one of
00:44:23.440canada's world-class companies um we have all the supply that we're going to need what happened a
00:44:28.260couple years later keystone xl canceled this is the exact policy when john a mcdonald it's the
00:44:35.460exact same thing repeating itself when he had a choice to build the national railway it would
00:44:39.920have been cheaper a lot cheaper and easier to cut down through the united states and if anyone's
00:44:44.680ever uh driven across the country you'll know how this works it's it's uh it's a similar distance
00:44:51.180But 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.
00:44:59.400But 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
00:45:11.840Part of their whole kind of North America belongs to them mentality at the time.
00:45:15.760now what's going on with these pipelines is we canned northern gateway for no apparent reason
00:45:21.600no logical reason instead became completely dependent on the completion of the keystone
00:45:25.960xl pipeline which was then cancelled by the incoming uh biden administration for no apparent
00:45:31.140reason just to appease part of his base but he doesn't care what trudeau's trudeau's doing now
00:45:35.900you've got this disaster with line five which would have been completely uh a non-issue if
00:45:41.180they built energy east as well and again we're completely we're we should be an energy superpower
00:45:46.420and instead we're a laughing stock being concerned about or getting our oil supplies to our two
00:45:51.880largest provinces and it's it's um i mean the line five thing is hilarious like if this happens
00:45:57.720and you have canada which i think is the third largest reserves of oil in the world and we have
00:46:02.980gasoline shortages in our two largest provinces that will be the epitome of the failure of political
00:46:08.920leadership um and the truth is that trans mountain might be done in a the expansion might be done in
00:46:14.820a year but northern gateway should be should be being finished right now and energy east should
00:46:20.480have already been built and they're not and we're losing we're losing billions of dollars
00:46:26.300i would say each and every day from those two pipelines not have being built and that's a
00:46:31.500significant issue it's a huge issue it's a huge issue especially as we pile on debt which we're
00:46:36.560then going to have to pay interest on which is then going to go to somebody else and our kids
00:46:40.660and their kids and their kids kids are all going to have to pay for it it's just insane
00:46:44.620one of the aspects to that that you know kind of come rears its head pretty quickly i mean there's
00:46:50.360news out of alberta today that jason kenny is actively being called to resign by his own caucus
00:46:56.100but but throughout the west there's this agitation and of course the western standard
00:47:00.480does a lot of this around this question,
00:47:34.140I 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.
00:47:46.320But 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.
00:48:00.320Look, I know lots of and this is why I'm not really on board.
00:48:04.400I 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.
00:48:25.320I 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.
00:48:42.860And I totally appreciate where they're coming from.
00:48:55.860And 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.
00:49:09.340but you know i i thought harper i thought harper was was a good prime minister um that wasn't that
00:49:15.920long ago you know he was there for feels like forever yeah it feels like forever ago but
00:49:23.660anyway so that's that's my point on that that i still think this country like i i really i really
00:49:28.640am a uh johnny mcdonald conservative who who you know he he was the one that brought the west into
00:49:34.120the country in the first place connected the west delivered to the west uh from the 85 rebellion to
00:49:40.580building that railway to um you know everything bring british columbia into confederation all
00:49:46.300of these kinds of things i mean he was kind of that original original person but we we need
00:49:51.060someone with that kind of imagination to really stand up and take take that on and uh you know
00:49:56.460not be afraid to take on the toronto elites the montreal elites the ottawa elites that so
00:50:01.200so often dominate policymaking in this country absolutely i and i must i must concede here again
00:50:08.500i didn't mean i didn't mean to put you on the spot there i am rather ambivalent around the
00:50:12.140question of sovereignty myself i i definitely think that it's a way of uh maybe getting some
00:50:16.640things that we want by threatening it i think quebec has done very well with that and if you
00:50:20.820could get some of the deals in the west that quebec has gotten for itself i think that would
00:50:24.860be great but in general i would like the borders of canada externally to remain the same internally
00:50:30.620i think there could be some rearrangement right down to the fact that even earlier as we were
00:50:34.620talking about uh the fact that there's going to be a rearrangement of our electoral boundaries
00:50:39.260inside of bc i i think that there might come time for us to start treating bc like kind of the way
00:50:45.500switzerland gets treated with its cantons it's you know what different sections of bc need to have
00:50:49.860their own say vancouver can do what it wants to do and and other parts of bc need to be able to not
00:50:55.180not go along with it whether we're talking about graduated licensing or the sky train and and
00:51:00.300subsidizing that, you know, that's all great when I'm visiting there, but I don't want to pay for
00:51:03.800it when I'm away, you know, and so there needs to be a rearrangement. But I think that's Canada in
00:51:07.520general, there needs to be a rearrangement, everybody feels like they're paying for each
00:51:10.700other's stuff and none of their own, and they're not getting a fair deal. Maybe as we kind of close
00:51:15.520here, Aaron, you could tell us just a little bit about what what's kind of on the horizon for you,
00:51:19.900what are you thinking about? I know that you've done some documentaries here, there and everywhere
00:51:25.320you're talking, you're trying to bring people real discussions, break through the political
00:51:29.560correctness and give people an honest look at things what's kind of on your agenda for the next
00:51:33.640little while right so uh i haven't i'll be announcing the next couple days but i'm doing
00:51:39.680a second season of my show politics explained which was which aired in the fall uh which are
00:51:45.90020 minute deeper dives into different issues the first season we did things like the rise of cancel
00:51:51.100culture uh meeting the protesters that oppose pipelines in canada that kind of thing really
00:51:56.100deep dives that that uh interview a lot of the key players and key experts on various topics
00:52:01.460then going into the field and exploring those issues directly we're doing one on forestry and
00:52:05.680what's going on at fairy creek i already started filming that so uh that's going to have my plate
00:52:10.640pretty full for the next month uh at that point as we move that to post-production i'm going to
00:52:16.200take the serious look and and make a decision on provincial politics here and the bc liberal
00:52:21.700leadership and and we'll see where that ends up um and we'll see where they uh we'll see where
00:52:27.160the province and country is at that time my thing has always been i love doing what i'm doing now
00:52:33.320i don't have any particular interest in getting into politics but i'm just so exhausted sitting
00:52:39.740on the sidelines and watching a huge number of british colombians or canadians whatever the case
00:52:46.300may be not have a voice i feel like they don't have a voice i feel you guys are doing a great
00:52:50.840job at the western standard because the media is one of those other the mainstream media is another
00:52:54.360one of those places where a huge number uh possibly you could say a majority of canadians
00:52:58.540don't have a voice um so i think it's important to start to start countering that in the media
00:53:04.000in politics all these different avenues it can't be one or the other and um i'm just kind of always
00:53:09.200keeping my eye my eyes open for where i feel that i can do uh the most good and the be the most
00:53:17.920effective at advancing those ideas so that's that's kind of what i'm up to right now and definitely
00:53:23.040wake up every morning and feel like i'm on the front lines of this of this fight and i'm sure
00:53:27.260you're the same same way with so your first question today was uh you know every reading
00:53:33.620through these news headlines every morning it's always something it's always something every
00:53:37.740morning something insane is going on so something insane completely insane the charlotte the
00:53:43.580charlottetown thing with with with john a it just and maybe maybe that's a perfect place to kind of
00:53:49.400conclude eric what if if you could give one one message to people who are totally don't don't
00:53:54.280know what to think of john a don't know what to think of of the country he founded what would you
00:53:58.680tell them what is the one thing they need to know about that man and about this country to to have
00:54:03.860some pride in it and move forward without johnny the country wouldn't exist so if you think that
00:54:11.260canada through its history it's 150 plus year history has been a net positive on the world has
00:54:18.000it been a net positive on your life and a net positive on the vast majority of people that
00:54:22.900live here if you think it's been a force for good if you think everything on balance it's been
00:54:28.900something that we can be proud of then we should be proud of johnny mcdonald and we need to
00:54:33.020remember his story and and if you believe all those things i think you should be celebrated
00:54:39.160and people should find but don't take my word for it there's doc there's uh biographies been
00:54:45.140been written about him uh even the internet which is which is a misleading place at times
00:54:50.720if you spend an hour or two um you can get a pretty good idea of the man that he was
00:54:56.440but uh that's what i would say is is he is you know single-handedly unlike many other countries
00:55:03.160in the world like germany france italy that were somewhat predestined to become nation states
00:55:10.040uh canada was not and it took the leadership of one man in particular uh in charlatetown
00:55:17.200to bring the four original colonies together and then rope in uh the rest over the next
00:55:22.660the subsequent decades so if you think canada is a good place you've got johnny mcdonald to thank
00:55:29.600and i think that should be celebrated i completely agree and you know i do think that there's it
00:55:36.980whatever whatever might need to be reformed in this country whether you're looking at it from
00:55:40.440the right or the left the fact the matter is is that we have we're very blessed to have this
00:55:44.200country and uh hopefully we can preserve it and and make it a better place a more equitable place
00:55:49.060for everyone where people do feel like they have a stake in it and a voice for sure 100 percent
00:55:54.620thank you so much for joining us today aaron and we hope we have you on again soon
00:55:59.540thanks for having me would be happy to come back anytime absolutely we'll follow up with you
00:56:05.160well we're uh very thankful of course for uh aaron being on with us today and now we get to do the
00:56:13.660whole thing that we've done a couple of times on the show so we're going to walk everybody through
00:56:17.060it very briefly here this is a live show uh we're not tucker carlson we don't have the my pillow guy
00:56:23.440to cut to here uh we are live and we don't have any commercials so unfortunately we are going to
00:56:29.620have to take a quick quick break uh we're going to just cut the feed for a moment it'll still be
00:56:35.340live don't worry and we're going to rearrange things here because we're going uh having someone
00:56:39.400in studio our guest here today is going to be stewart parkert stick around for that
00:56:42.980we're just going to be gone for probably about one minute all right
00:57:23.440And just like that, Stuart Parker has appeared.
00:57:51.920Look 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.
00:58:16.880All 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.
00:58:37.860huh so the gas is there but the company won't release it until it can bill for it
00:58:45.320and right now the billing software is down and i think that really speaks to our time doesn't it's
00:58:53.080like oh no it's broken what do you mean broken well i can't charge people money for it so it
00:58:57.780doesn't work uh you know i don't know i might install some software to make some guesses make
00:59:06.040some deals with some local authorities about how to average out the billing and move forward. But
00:59:12.500we don't live in that world. We live in a world where the gas line is taken hostage. And then
00:59:19.320the person who owns the gas line takes us hostage to deal with the hostage situation.
00:59:24.260I mean, that's, that's brilliant, right? Like, why don't we just hold a knife to yourself? You
00:59:28.360you've got them, you've got them. They can't take you away from you. You're the perfect
00:59:32.140hostage taker of yourself exactly so it's all coming together we often think that things aren't
00:59:37.960working when in fact they're working exactly as they were intended to exactly as they were designed
00:59:43.940which is don't move the gas until the money flows exactly and uh that's um you know that that hasn't
00:59:52.560gotten any less true since frank herbert wrote dune and they kept repeating the spice must flow
00:59:57.500The spice must flow. That's all that's going on here. But it is unfortunate that we have so much
01:00:06.000in North America dependent upon a privately owned pipeline system. I thought Aaron Ekman was really
01:00:13.240on point when he said, look, if this is vital infrastructure, socialize it. Put it in the hands
01:00:18.260of the state so the state can move it. Or you can argue it's not vital infrastructure. It's just a
01:00:26.540that people use to make money. And then we can take a different position. And then people can
01:00:32.000go, the other really sad warning I saw associated with all this was people taking plastic bags to
01:00:37.920the gas station. Yeah, that was, I didn't really know what to make of that. That was a, that was
01:00:43.120one of those moments where I sat there and I was like, oh no. It's one of those not even wrong
01:00:48.240situations. It's too wrong in too many ways at the same time. Exactly. All I can say is let's
01:00:54.440remember, folks, that between May and September, Easterners are not freezing in the dark, right?
01:01:02.560That stereotype we have from Peter Lougheed in Alberta was lovely back when Eastern energy
01:01:08.140consumption peaked in the winter, which it doesn't anymore. It peaks because air conditioners take
01:01:15.280more power than heating systems do. Well, because you're having to convert it three times in order
01:01:22.180to get to the same thing converting it right you're you have to heat something up in order to
01:01:26.720make something colder right it's contrary to you know you're you're working against entropy
01:01:31.640and so the laws of science would say don't cry too hard for the easterners they can turn off0.79
01:01:38.400their conditioning get a hibachi and cook the stuff that's thawing in their freezer yeah of
01:01:43.080course of course i think those are i think that that's where we i i just can't get that excited
01:01:48.400about energy crises during the summer i mean i lived out east i hate i hate that mississippi air
01:01:55.120mass i just sweated all the time sweating was like my job and my phd was my side gig but uh
01:02:02.540anyway but but sweating is what you sign up for if you're from there so no i i remember visiting
01:02:08.380just the great lakes just just just the southern ontario i was in toronto i'm just visiting there
01:02:12.900for five minutes i was like i need to leave i gotta get out of here oh yeah well let me tell
01:02:18.220you i when i arrived when i moved to ontario to do my uh uh to go back to school i woke up the
01:02:25.260first morning and it's like why am i awake so early it's 5 30 a.m and everything is so hot and
01:02:31.100sticky and i'm on the floor of this mostly unfurnished apartment and i turn on the cbc
01:02:36.440and the first announcement is that there's been um a coal fire generation air inversion and people
01:02:45.900with respiratory problems shouldn't leave the house. And I thought, oh God, this sounds bad.
01:02:53.180And then there was an extreme heat warning stating that people with another set of health problems
01:02:59.740shouldn't leave the house. And then they announced that Hydro One hadn't bought enough power that day
01:03:06.380and everybody needed to turn their air conditioner off to avoid brownouts. And it's like, well,
01:03:11.460welcome to the center of the universe exactly uh this is this is the place that canada is run from
01:03:17.880i i don't know what to make of that i it's almost you know what i think that it was said best uh
01:03:23.500by somebody who's actually quite left-wing a friend of mine jeff brom who said that the reason
01:03:27.680the real reason that the fords need to be left in charge of ontario forever it's exactly what
01:03:32.180they deserve they should be king of ontario in perpetuity well the thing is like i was living
01:03:40.920in toronto in 2010 might have voted for rob ford in the civic election to be perfectly honest uh
01:03:47.160given the array i mean he was up against george smitherman otherwise known as furious george
01:03:52.520the guy who was responsible for the provincial e-health scandal where he tried to get a single
01:03:57.640electronic patient record put together and somehow lost over a hundred million dollars uh so uh he
01:04:05.960was up against rob ford and the thing was a lot of people on the left if they lived in the outer
01:04:10.600communities in toronto both went out and voted for rob ford and before he was even declared elected
01:04:16.920started organizing to save their local library because they knew he'd come for their library
01:04:21.240and they liked their library but as much as they loved their library they hated the smug pricks of
01:04:28.600the laurentian elite who had been running their city more and the prospect of embarrassing them
01:04:35.560by electing rob ford was more attractive than a public library branch it uh and you really do
01:04:43.480start to feel that way if you live in ontario like it's pretty weird to go somewhere and i'm
01:04:48.680just this rube from the west who should not be taken seriously and they have different reasons0.98
01:04:54.360for not taking everybody seriously and eventually people get tired of it it's sort of like some jerk0.99
01:05:01.000he was parking their, you know, BMW in the garage, in your garage. And you can't really do0.97
01:05:06.220anything about it. The cops aren't going to help. They they're with the guy with the BMW.
01:05:10.100The only thing you can do is burn your garage down out of spite, self-immolated.
01:05:16.480If you kamikaze hard enough, you, you will carry the day.
01:05:20.980Yeah. So, and also I think what Doug Ford, like if John Horgan had been handed the same set of
01:05:28.300economic and epidemiological conditions as doug ford he would have done much worse we have to
01:05:35.980remember that doug ford had better sick leave more proactive lockdowns did not do things like
01:05:44.200declaring sport fishing an essential service but it is it is i'm all for survival fishing
01:05:51.220sport fishing not essential so so so you look at the measures doug ford took it's just that he was
01:05:56.820running a jurisdiction like New York. It was the primary airport in the country, primary migration
01:06:02.000reception point, primary industrial center. But if John Horgan and Bonnie Henry's rules had been
01:06:08.320enacted in Ontario, you'd see a way higher body count than Doug Ford produced, which proved to me
01:06:14.640that fundamentally at the deepest level, your average bank robber is a lot more compassionate
01:06:22.560than your average banker uh i feel like doug ford just was out of his depth like he had just come to
01:06:31.520loot the province well yeah i mean like that's what he's here to do yes and he was like oh no0.74
01:06:37.200these people are dying oh no oh damn it and you could just you could just see it as like i think0.89
01:06:45.280that whole the ontario covet response is like an american heist movie where the bank robber gets0.99
01:06:51.200into the bank and then he discovers that nobody cares if the hostages die and then he's like oh
01:06:58.320geez maybe i'm looking after the hostages now i don't even know i just came to rob the bank
01:07:04.320just let me take my money i just wanted the money i didn't want things to get complicated
01:07:08.740yeah well but this is just it like it's like i mean whatever whatever my one might say of the
01:07:14.160fords i mean the ford family is what it is it's ford nation i mean they get to call themselves
01:07:18.540ford nation that's a whole other thing but it but ultimately it truly i think you've hit you've hit
01:07:23.620it on the head there like he you know he was there to kind of be a brute and a bully but even a brute
01:07:28.360and a bully must have some kind of empathy because they know when they're not being respected so they
01:07:32.460know how to dish out bullying whereas you go off to bonnie henry and john horgan it's like they're
01:07:37.840on cloud whatever they're not on this planet anymore they don't care i don't think they're
01:07:42.700even the good guys in their own story uh like i really struggle to decode those folks i'm like
01:07:50.800normally everybody's the good guy in their own story but i think horkin's the bad guy in his
01:07:56.740story he's not he's not good enough yet he's i don't know but like it could even be i mean he
01:08:01.980could be a way better socialist because he's not much of a socialist he's not much of a social
01:08:06.200democrat he he doesn't he could be he could be christy clark's you know like like older brother
01:08:13.080if he wanted to be like he's not where's the policy differences yeah there's there's regime
01:08:17.560continuity except in two areas and i'll give him props for those two areas he put some breaks on
01:08:26.600on the amassing of houses in BC. He did create some small financial penalties for people who
01:08:36.580are collecting homes as investments. And fair enough, he probably slowed down that house
01:08:43.960appreciation a little bit. At least he did something. The other thing is that he has
01:08:49.460undone the NDP's 1990s welfare policies. So the welfare policies that he was part of a government
01:08:56.220that enacted in the 90s he's realized that they were horribly punitive towards poor people
01:09:01.660and has mostly reset them to where they were under social credit so which weren't exactly
01:09:07.580the friends of poor people and somehow the ndp did worse well actually i would argue that social
01:09:14.380credit um i had a very you know so one of my my political mentors is george jibo who was um you
01:09:22.300know social credits research director for 16 years and george and i were talking about like well why
01:09:29.900was public policy so good when you had like according to the cd how institute social credit
01:09:35.820was a disaster because the people in government had very few degrees they had very few credentials
01:09:42.220and the businesses they owned were pretty small generally and the your two typical social credit
01:09:49.020candidates were the guy who runs the used car lot and the guy who runs the open line show and right
01:09:55.340every little town used to have a used car lot and an open line show and the thing is if your open
01:10:02.300line show was going to work everybody had to call in and expect fair play whether you agreed with
01:10:08.060them or not and like what we try to do here yeah so whether you agreed with so the open so the guy
01:10:14.780hosting the show had to be fair to everybody in the community to keep that show running
01:10:20.380same thing with the used car law you needed everybody to be getting their used car there
01:10:27.180you couldn't afford to lose your indigenous customers no you couldn't afford to price
01:10:33.020people who were unemployed out of having a beater car to get around town yeah you couldn't do that0.93
01:10:38.620everybody had to be able to come across that lot and while that's not socialism that's a heck of
01:10:44.700a lot closer to socialism than um what the ndp became which is um the other party pretty much
01:10:56.060well now now the administration now a single mother's used car the taxes she pays on it
01:11:01.260subsidized the lawyer's leaf mobile and his tesla oh look look man i got a friend with a leaf the
01:11:08.460people with leaves have a hard road to hoe he is he had to build uh because leaf is so one of the0.66
01:11:16.700things the big auto industry folks did is they're not that thrilled about getting off fossil fuels
01:11:21.580it means a lot of redesign it means a lot of sourcing of different commodities it means
01:11:25.660depending on supply chains that are further away so they typically chose to make really bad
01:11:34.780electric vehicles now props to elon musk in the sense that he made good electric vehicles
01:11:40.940but for chevy or someone it's not even your objective to make a good ev your objective is to
01:11:47.100say we have an ev please don't too many people buy one uh because that inconveniences us and
01:11:53.660everybody else just just weirdos retrofit all these factories and change everything and well
01:11:59.900and also with the old leaves they the uh the chargers don't work with the more powerful
01:12:05.020chargers they heat up and the um and you and then the car thinks it's overheated and then it shuts
01:12:11.900down for eight hours and strands you wherever you were so anyway my friend art has designed an
01:12:16.940adapter so that the new chargers don't destroy his leaf we're going to be testing it on the 25th
01:12:23.500it took us 17 hours to get to vancouver in a leaf last time we're going to see how much time this
01:12:29.500new charging adapter cuts but it's um i wouldn't go so far as to say i mean look everybody who's
01:12:37.900in a vehicle is rolling in one kind of subsidy or another because you know where um the one
01:12:44.460thing john horgan has done is he's increased fossil fuel subsidies to the highest they have
01:12:49.260been in the history of british columbia so we're paying for a lot of extraction um for the fuel
01:12:57.020it's just that the subsidy formula is different and in my view if we're going to subsidize
01:13:03.260personal vehicles which i really question at all um then you know subsidize the ones that are
01:13:11.020solving a problem i have no idea what the what problem the average car is solving other than
01:13:17.340the failure of the government to provide decent mass transit uh that's mostly what our fossil
01:13:23.740fuel subsidies subsidize well that and the corporations that extract the fossil fuels and
01:13:28.700put the money in a sack but uh i uh bank robbers that don't need hostages they just they just
01:13:35.900they just rob and they go yeah but i i'm much more a fan of like old tech that would address this
01:13:42.380like light rail damn train back on the bc rail line like you don't even need to do a new thing
01:13:48.940buy a bud car stick it on the line like it used to be before you know we paid cn to take the rail0.95
01:13:55.900company off our hands at a 91 subsidy so what did happen with bc rail what happened there
01:14:03.260i've never gotten a straight answer as to what happened to bc rail well it's pretty simple um
01:14:08.060Campbell got in on the promise of not privatizing BC Rail. Obviously, though, his party was
01:14:22.640ideologically committed to the privatization of any profitable crown asset. This is the idiocy1.00
01:14:29.080of privatization. Nobody sells off a part of a government that isn't making the government money.0.98
01:14:34.860Why? Because you couldn't sell it. No one would buy it. So the only parts of the government you
01:14:39.900can sell off in a privatization deal are parts that are bringing cash in and replacing tax
01:14:46.860dollars. So you sell off BC Rail or some other asset. It's like selling the furniture to pay
01:14:54.620the mortgage. It's a very silly financial move. So the liberals were constrained. They couldn't0.88
01:15:00.780just sell it so of course they came up with the idea of the 1 000 year lease 1 000 years yes well
01:15:08.140999 and 364 days i think technically so they then went out there and said all right who wants to
01:15:16.620have us see i have the old bc rail line for a thousand years and uh now the assessed value of
01:15:25.180the line uh they have some estimations on the second coming of christ i guess yeah
01:15:31.580so the so so the estimated cost of the line was um the estimated value was 1.1 billion
01:15:39.900so they sold it for 90 million uh or 900 90 million and uh so huge huge discount justified
01:15:51.180how well we're not really selling it we still own it we've only lent it to somebody for a thousand
01:15:56.140years so uh so then omni tracks and cn get into a competition uh for that and um at this point
01:16:07.820folks in the bureaucracy um are it's pretty clear that there's a lot of self-dealing going on and
01:16:18.140And there's a lot of explaining to do about the sale.
01:16:22.660And Kevin Falcon, Gary Collins, all kinds of fairly high-level people look as though they might be implicated.
01:16:32.440But fortunately, there were two low-level officials who had leaked information to the losing bid.
01:16:41.080So Bassey and Virk ended up doing time for leaking information to Omnitracks.
01:16:50.860Nobody has ever really investigated the CN sale and how the decisions were made, how Collins and others were involved.
01:17:00.060and one of the things i thought the ndp would do given that they've created the cullen commission
01:17:07.360and whatnot would be there's they used to be big fans of there being public assets it's like well
01:17:14.380look this sale was so screwed up people did time um maybe we should look into that surely
01:17:20.860surely we might have some legal standing to get the line back given that it was sold off in such
01:17:29.560a greasy way. But that was ruled out. As soon as the party took office, they were worried
01:17:36.300about another Capitol strike. And so we also have to look at the Cullen Commission in this context.
01:17:43.380We think that this is about the government going after criminal wrongdoing in the Solicitor General's
01:17:50.620office under Rich Coleman, shielding casinos from money laundering investigations.
01:17:57.160let's remember though that um the point of the cullen commission and of commissions generally
01:18:05.840like people have this a lot of people on the left like truth and reconciliation commissions
01:18:10.120because they don't know what they are what they're for what these commissions are for typically
01:18:14.960is legally immunizing people so they can testify before the commission the commission's primary
01:18:22.300function in a situation like this is to shield people from criminal penalties in exchange for
01:18:29.640telling the truth. That's how government commissions work. So if you actually think
01:18:34.760there have been a bunch of crimes and a bunch of people should be punished, you want to hand that
01:18:40.540to a special prosecutor and the cops. You don't want to hand it to a commission. But I think one
01:18:48.740the reasons for this is we've got to remember who's joe so john horgan's chief of staff jeff
01:18:54.660megs right they were both officials in the glenn clark government um both uh you know horgan was
01:19:01.300a lifelong new democrat uh megs had spent most of his life as a communist party of canada organizer
01:19:07.140it's important though to understand that the communist party of canada
01:19:11.300for the whole duration of the cold war was just a dodgy scheme for getting beach vacations
01:19:16.420uh so it was just that people couldn't afford a vacation and you get a free one in cuba or the
01:19:23.540ukraine at the beach if um you were a high enough level communist so uh that sounds like a pretty
01:19:30.020good reason to join does that still carry today for cuba extent um actually well the problem is
01:19:34.820they've got worse holiday destinations although when the mark um and of course there are two
01:19:39.220different parties handing out the holidays so the communist party can hand out cuban holidays
01:19:44.820um and you know they used to be able to hand out ukrainian and russian holidays obviously they
01:19:50.620couldn't do that anymore but then the other party the marxist leninist party they were the people
01:19:55.780who sided with china but then when the nixon went to china they decided they were the albania party
01:20:02.020which is was crazy except that until you've been to an albanian beach uh the beaches in albania
01:20:10.840are bloody incredible. It's the Mediterranean. Yes, but sadly, the regime in Albania has fallen
01:20:16.660now, and the Marxist-Leninists were quite hard up until Robert Mugabe went totally crazy.
01:20:23.580And now you can go on safaris to Victoria Falls if you're a Marxist-Leninist. So anyway,
01:20:31.100reasons to join. Long digression. But Jeff Meigs and John Horgan, right, 2001, they're out on their
01:20:38.060year. They're not in government anymore. So Megs becomes associated with Larry Campbell,
01:20:47.720the former coroner, former senior police officer, very popular, and he becomes the chief of staff
01:20:56.500of Larry Campbell when he's mayor of Vancouver. And one of the first things he does is he starts
01:21:02.180helping out his old pal, John Horgan, who is what at this point? A lobbyist for the casino industry.
01:21:08.780Interesting. So Horgan and Megs cook up this plan for a waterfront casino. And it's great because
01:21:16.660Megs gives a speech to the annual general meeting of the Coalition of Progressive Electors,
01:21:21.240explaining that we have to have a waterfront casino because of the false consciousness of
01:21:25.660the working class uh so you know no don't say communism was good for nothing beach vacations
01:21:32.480and casino promotion so meg's um and now larry campbell remains um and so larry campbell is the
01:21:43.420primary point of contact for horgan's business and it's larry campbell's uh larry campbell sits
01:21:52.580on the board of the great canadian casino it's larry campbell's casino that did most of the
01:21:57.920money laundering and so it's you sort of wonder the ndp might have any number of reasons to want
01:22:08.880to immunize people from prosecution in exchange for their testimony because nobody has the real
01:22:15.440story of how megs horgan and campbell fit together we just know that larry campbell
01:22:21.800although he's a senator, doesn't feel particularly obliged to testify or cooperate with the police.
01:22:34.380And one one party, one one opposition, the people, one group of people to punish.
01:22:41.060I 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.
01:22:50.120it's like it's like being a lobbyist for tobacco like doesn't it just sell itself like who do you
01:22:54.780need a lobbyist for these things anymore it's like i'm here to help the government make a
01:22:58.760ridiculous amount of revenue off of the least of these and to enslave people so why don't you just
01:23:04.600give me my golden paycheck already and i'll walk oh yeah what do you have to sell no it's quite
01:23:11.560funny there was a great line in trailer park boys where uh julian's saying to ricky is dead
01:23:17.320Ray, stop going to the video lottery terminals. It's like, hey, you know, Julian, the Lord made
01:23:24.120the video lottery terminals. He made all of creation. He says, look, that's not what's
01:23:30.560going on here. The government put those video lottery terminals at the bar because they don't
01:23:36.300like giving out welfare checks and they want the money back. And that's about the size of it,
01:23:42.140right? These governments conceptualize these things as cost recovery measures. But we actually
01:23:47.820did in the 90s have something called a gambling expansion strategy. And when I was running in the
01:23:53.400White Rock by-election in 97, I said, well, should we have an alcohol expansion strategy too?
01:23:59.380Like, why stop there? Now, the supposed justification for government casinos and
01:24:08.240government uh vlt um is that we're preventing people from going to vegas this is a very
01:24:19.200no they didn't really write that down yeah absolutely this is the same logic as pipelines
01:24:25.360so so this is going to get ugly okay okay so the the supply basically their idea is that the laws
01:24:34.080of supply and demand don't apply to gambling that there's a finite amount of gambling the
01:24:40.240population of british columbia will do and no matter how much you increase or reduce the
01:24:45.840number of casinos the ease of getting to them the um you know proximity of bars to the casinos all
01:24:54.000that stuff that we're just going to gamble exactly the same amount no matter what and then it's just
01:25:00.640just a matter of, well, we should get our share. The more casinos, the more VLTs we put here,
01:25:07.020the less money will go to Vegas. Now, we all know that the laws of supply and demand are real,
01:25:14.880that if you reduce the difficulty of doing a thing, and if you increase the supply of that
01:25:22.400thing, more of it will be consumed. Now, let's think about the rhetoric we're using to sell LNG.
01:25:33.140China will consume exactly the same amount of energy no matter what. It doesn't matter how
01:25:38.460much you increase the supply of fossil fuels, it will be flat. So we're just replacing dirty coal
01:25:44.360with clean LNG. There's no way more natural gas will be consumed just because there's twice as
01:25:50.800much of it on the market and the price has collapsed. That's nonsense. We all know you put
01:25:57.580more stuff out there cheaper, more of it's going to get consumed. Adam Smith has never been proven
01:26:04.440wrong on that point. Even Mark said so. Yeah, that's just common sense. But you can see how
01:26:12.920Horgan could easily slip into the rhetoric of we're replacing coal with a clean energy source
01:26:19.100because he'd already been hawking the same logic.
01:26:23.520Now, of course, you can't actually measure flights to Vegas from a jurisdiction.
01:26:27.260So we know that these arguments are completely false,
01:26:30.280that the more gambling you put in a jurisdiction,
01:26:33.760the more flights to Vegas there are per month.
01:26:39.860Don't you want to go to a really nice one or at least a really weird one?
01:26:44.500You know, the strip in Vegas is great.
01:26:47.440uh so you um you habituate people to gambling then they see an activity that they can center
01:26:54.620that holiday on so the reality is of course and the reason people like horgan made money in his
01:27:00.340old line of work is that everyone in the gambling industry does better if you create more gambling
01:27:07.420opportunities anywhere it truly is a rising tide lifting all boats except of course the finances
01:27:15.540of the people who are gaming yep no that makes sense that's a very socially conservative
01:27:20.500argument story that's extremely socially because that's basically the same argument that's made1.00
01:27:24.420about pornography absolutely um well this is why we're seeing all kinds of feminist organizations
01:27:32.560working for boris johnson's tories right uh this is a very strange moment when um the left has got
01:27:41.160so crazy that um you know people like me and like the head of rape relief are being slowly pushed
01:27:49.900onto the conservative side just by the sheer insanity of what's going on elsewhere fortunately
01:27:56.580there's enough insanity on the conservative side we can you know we can still keep ricocheting back
01:28:01.880and forth exactly it's like it's like you know i one of the things you had just written about in
01:28:06.380your blog i think there's something that would be good for the viewers to kind of understand a bit
01:28:10.560This idea of how what what went wrong with the left in the sense of harassment policy and how that broke down solidarity.
01:28:18.780Maybe maybe we can walk through what even solidarity is first a little bit and then we'll get to what's going on there.
01:28:23.800Sure. Well, let me start with the starting point.
01:28:25.880The 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.
01:28:34.480And there was this piece of a puzzle that I had been missing for a long time.
01:28:40.560And 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.
01:28:58.800And 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.
01:29:07.920So why not have something like this at work?
01:29:10.180and signed off with very little thought about it. But in fact, the negotiators for these
01:29:18.360corporations are actually far smarter and thinking a longer game than the union negotiators they were
01:29:25.460up against. Because the central problem of capitalism since the fall of the Soviet Union
01:29:32.840has been to get it back onto the track that it was on before the rise of the Soviet Union,
01:29:38.720where you have a huge gap between rich and poor, workers have very few rights, everything's being
01:29:44.520paid for on installment plans, and the economy is largely deregulated. Now, that's what makes
01:29:53.120profits, right? The more you can skim off and send to investors, the better your business is running.
01:30:00.220And so following the collapse of the Soviet Union, we went through this process called austerity,
01:30:05.780where both the private and public sector, when we need to shed employees, we need to become more
01:30:13.560efficient. How are we going to do that? And also, how do we get rid of these union protections of
01:30:21.880job security? How do we get to the point where we have at-will employment again and a right-to-work
01:30:29.360environment yeah exempt employees yeah so this how do you facilitate that well one of the ways to do
01:30:37.680that is to start educating workers about um you both educate and i use educate uh advisedly
01:30:50.640you're educating workers uh supposedly about the evils of racism the evils of sexism the evils of
01:30:57.440bullying but what you're really doing is you're the companies that come in and do this and they're
01:31:04.000a whole industry um their methodology is not based on any recognizable pedagogy or educational
01:31:13.120principles it's from 1970s cults like the est movement becoming the landmark forum so what you
01:31:20.560do what you do is you accuse everybody in the room of being a racist you make everybody feel bad and
01:31:26.160And 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.
01:31:41.460You destroy their ego in front of the group, and then you rebuild their ego in the context of the group.
01:31:48.200And the person goes, I am going to be different now, blah, blah, blah.
01:31:51.180Now, of course, that's corrosive to solidarity.
01:31:54.600of course, it makes people more focused on their work environment. But the other thing is,
01:32:01.020these policies are not about people abusing their rank at work. It's not like we have a policy
01:32:08.120against harassment, and you can use the fact that you're of a lower rank as grounds for why you're
01:32:15.000being harassed. No, being of a lower class or a lower rank is not a legit reason to file a
01:32:21.740complaint. What's a legit reason? And it's interesting how it's expressed is if you feel
01:32:28.180that you're the subject of racism, if you feel you're the subject of sexism, if you feel you're
01:32:33.880the subject of transphobia or homophobia. Now, what that does is it de-links your complaint
01:32:41.660from any available evidence. So if you actually are, if you can show all these instances where
01:32:49.720were called a racist name or something and there's like a paper trail that doesn't really make much
01:32:54.920difference because it's not about what's happened it's about how you feel and similarly if you can't
01:33:03.160find any evidence but you have some very strong feelings that can count and so what these complaint
01:33:10.840processes really are is a measure of how much social capital you have at work and how many
01:33:16.280friends you have at work. And you also have to look at, well, who do complaints get lodged
01:33:21.820against? Well, they don't tend to get lodged against one superior because your superior
01:33:26.580has all of these new powers to punish you as corporations get more hierarchical. They have
01:33:33.440more managers. There's more surveillance. More people are watching you. So successful complaints
01:33:39.440tend to be directed against someone of equal or lower rank. You can only punch down. You could
01:33:44.620only punch down or across. And the consequences are obvious. People who lack social capital at
01:33:53.480work because they don't fit in, they're the people who are most likely to be targeted successfully
01:34:00.920in processes like this. Now, this has become married to the internet. And so one of the
01:34:09.540things that these policies typically don't do is they don't stipulate that you can only complain
01:34:14.720about people's activities at work. The fact that they exist at work and might do something you
01:34:21.000don't like outside of work becomes a grounds for you feeling like they're oppressing you,
01:34:27.840feeling like they're being bigoted towards you. And so what this means is that effectively,
01:34:34.800everybody now has a morals clause in their contract that they have to engage in non-controversial
01:34:43.340speech outside of work, or they may be the victim of workplace discipline. And, you know, this was,
01:34:51.500um, this is spelled out to me pretty directly in my own recent interactions with a former employer.
01:34:59.080uh there's this moment of um saying well but you know dr parker was ill dr parker uh you know you
01:35:07.740asked for all this medical documentation here it all is it's like and the employer says well it's
01:35:11.580not really about that actually it's about what he says on twitter uh and what's interesting is that
01:35:18.340in that process um while my employer is trying to get rid of me because they don't like their
01:35:23.620my political opinions the big social justice activist of campus immediately joins in attacking
01:35:32.660me you know and echoing the employer's accusations against me that i'm misogynist that i'm sexist
01:35:39.460blah blah blah and what's going on in this guy's mind is that he's being a social justice warrior
01:35:46.420he is doing the work of equity by chasing an evil misogynist out of the workplace
01:35:52.580but of course 100 years ago he wouldn't have been called social justice warrior he would have been
01:35:57.200called a snitch or a scab because what he's doing is volunteer work for the boss to help someone
01:36:05.860else get fired and of course this is the genius of how the human resources industry has turned
01:36:16.740the woke left into its weapons what are the main demands what were the main demands right against
01:36:23.280harvey weinstein that harvey weinstein be fired right those are the big demands that tend to get
01:36:30.000made uh when uh in this sort of cancel culture moment the idea is that now mia kirschner a
01:36:39.240brilliant canadian actress wrote a piece rebutting all that during the harvey weinstein me too moment
01:36:45.040She 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.
01:37:00.620uh we need proper labor standards where sag negotiates um uh we need to get rid of this
01:37:08.500two-tiered membership in the union where all the extras have no voting rights and she enumerated1.00
01:37:14.140all these structural changes that could prevent women from being sexually victimized in hollywood
01:37:19.420but those things went nowhere i think sarah polly agreed with them because i think they're like
01:37:24.520neighbors in toronto but that was it everybody else is like fire weinstein fire spacey find these
01:37:31.960individual guys and chase them out of work which also reveals a really ugly assumption because
01:37:38.120you know i've said to the people who are after me well where am i supposed to work now well you're
01:37:45.240not supposed to work well where am i supposed to live you're not supposed to live anywhere
01:37:48.680uh we'll give you a sign it says unclean yeah but actually what it means is and and of course
01:37:56.260they you know uh these folks they go after your friends they tell your friends not to associate
01:38:01.280with you they um you know uh and this is all about yeah they go after your family and this is all
01:38:07.940supposedly about social justice but their actual belief is that you don't deserve to live if you
01:38:15.780think the wrong thoughts that the plan is not for you to be alive if you think the wrong thoughts
01:38:22.260and this has come to replace what we used to call solidarity which was that even if somebody is a
01:38:29.940dick at work you stick up for them because you all have the same boss and you all collectively have
01:38:35.860the same interests and you don't have to like the people who you share interests with you can be0.94
01:38:41.140annoyed by the fact that they leave work early and you have to cover for them. But at the end of
01:38:46.060the day, solidarity is a culture of shoring other people up, putting forward a common front,
01:38:53.260strengthening your workplace, making it a workplace where, yeah, there are still problems,
01:39:00.820but you're not in an environment where you wonder who is listening to your conversation,
01:39:07.800whether people are reading what you've said online whether people know that you have a reddit account
01:39:14.140because if you've got a bunch of people and even if they all vote to go on strike together
01:39:19.940they are not going to stick together when things get tough in the negotiations if they're all spying
01:39:26.020on each other and reporting each other and we've turned these forms of surveillance from a moral
01:39:32.780failure into the very essence of social justice and uh it's an amazing parlor trick and a lot of
01:39:40.640people you know they blame the post-modernists or they they blame the communists and all that
01:39:46.140nonsense the communists just wanted their beach vacations all the communists are trying to do is
01:39:51.260go to the beach all the post-modernists are trying to do is have like a contest to see
01:39:56.320how many words you can write before you get to a verb like the these are like small things that
01:40:01.800people are doing at universities or in social clubs. The people who've created our so-called
01:40:07.700cancel culture moment, or what I prefer to call our neo-McCarthyism moment, are big HR. They're
01:40:15.280the people who expanded MBA programs in the 80s, 90s, and aughts. The people who created the
01:40:22.420executive mba um these are the folks who are doing your uh workplace anti-racism training
01:40:32.140also which is kind of inconvenient because they don't actually know anything about race or racism
01:40:39.860because they haven't studied it they're not usually from an unprivileged class either
01:40:44.440And 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.
01:41:01.120So if you had to have someone who was specialized in management, that used to be the degree.
01:41:07.320It's eight months of part-time training.
01:41:10.900And, but the tuition fees for an MBA are going to be the same or larger as for the four-year program in commerce.
01:41:19.220So 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.
01:41:29.960Where 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.
01:41:56.320Now, the other thing that we started seeing, though, are organizations like the one that went after those yoga studios in Boulder, Colorado.
01:42:06.940I 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.
01:42:18.000And so it was a real carrot stick thing.
01:42:21.060So do you want to buy some anti-racism training?
01:42:23.940are you sure because if you don't want to buy this product from us we'll put on a protest and
01:42:29.860organize a boycott and we will take you down um that's called extortion that is it's also um you0.53
01:42:37.040know this is why uh black lives matter vancouver was expelled from the black lives matter movement
01:42:42.220the chicago and new york blm chapters just uh severed ties with vancouver because it's actually
01:42:49.260mainly a theater ticket scalping business uh if there's a black entertainer coming to town
01:42:55.400um bl in vancouver approaches your venue and says um we're going to tell this person not to come0.58
01:43:02.440because you're a racist organization um unless we get these dress circle tickets that we then resell
01:43:09.900so uh and this is catastrophic right mainly for people who have to deal with racism in their daily
01:43:17.620lives. I was just reading the statistics. Unlike most racialized people, indigenous women,
01:43:25.58096% of indigenous women who have been sexually assaulted have been sexually assaulted by a0.89
01:43:31.660non-indigenous person, right? Like that is an incredibly clear statistical piece of information
01:43:39.080that this society has serious problems with racism. And the discourse about the racism that
01:43:46.720we're dealing with in this society has been hijacked by big HR to make people's jobs less
01:43:52.680secure rather than to fight racism. And all kinds of well-intentioned chumps have been taken in
01:43:59.300and are working to drive me out of employment, drive Aaron Ackman out of employment, drive
01:44:05.120whoever out of employment, instead of thinking about what can we do to actually address the
01:44:14.440significant issues of racism in our society that is literally killing our neighbors it's it's a
01:44:21.580profound statement but not one i can disagree with i think it's important that people hear it
01:44:25.480something something that kind of bridges that gap a little bit i think steward is that recently
01:44:30.160it was discussed it was mentioned somewhere that that perhaps to solve some of the problems we're
01:44:35.000seeing in the armed forces in canada especially when it comes to sexual assault and that sort of
01:44:39.060thing um is is that they should have a union and i sat there and i was kind of like oh that's
01:44:44.620interesting because i mean one wouldn't think of of rankers having a union being a very good way
01:44:49.000to fight a war but then again you have to look back to the civil war in spain and the anarchists
01:44:54.300managed to put up a pretty good fight without having any proper ranks i mean orwell documents
01:44:58.460that pretty well and you can also do it in you don't have to turn the army into a co-op which
01:45:04.080is what's going on in Kurdistan, what was going on in Spain. You don't have to turn the army into an
01:45:10.000anarchist co-op. We're not even saying the officers have to join the union. The point is
01:45:15.080that the folks on the bottom have some kind of collective representation. And in many ways,
01:45:24.020I think American voting patterns have gotten out right ahead of that. One of the things that I
01:45:28.640found most interesting was it used to be that you could rely on people at all ranks in the u.s army
01:45:35.900to back the republicans as the national security party and then a really interesting thing happened
01:45:42.880the ron paul presidential bids now ron paul's an ambivalent figure right i really disagree with
01:45:49.680him on a bunch of stuff but ron paul sought the republican nomination on a ticket of letting you
01:45:56.580come home. And a huge swing took place amongst, not the officer class, but the regular enlisted
01:46:06.180men. And they were the only, these bases on foreign soil were the only places that Ron Paul
01:46:14.220swept in his presidential bids. And ironically, the person who inherited those voters was Bernie
01:46:20.140Sanders, that Ron Paul ended up functioning as this conduit from a group of people who thought
01:46:29.940the officers were looking after them, thought their party was looking after them, to a group
01:46:34.040of people who were very strategically making radical voting decisions in a fairly cohesive
01:46:41.840way. This isn't the story of the fragmentation of the military vote. This is the story of the
01:46:48.420fragmentation of the U.S. military vote becoming more self-conscious and more sophisticated.
01:46:54.580And that's something that, you know, Scott Koston, who advocated for this, he comes out of the
01:47:02.200Canadian forces, he says the Canadian forces are ready for that. The problem is that we need to
01:47:08.460find different institutional mechanisms to galvanize the folks enlisted in the army. Because
01:47:28.700uh and um we really have to think about um uh how decisions are made for those folks and how
01:47:38.700their interests diverge from the officers interests or from the strategic interests of
01:47:44.460the state so it's not something that one can induce from outside the military but i think it
01:47:52.420would be my hope is that the parts of the canadian trade union movement that aren't completely
01:47:58.340useless, will get behind and put real resources into a rank-and-file-led effort in the Canadian
01:48:09.860forces. And I think we'll see, it'll be very interesting to see what the grievances and
01:48:16.260priorities are, how much this focuses on veterans' care, how much this focuses on questions of
01:48:22.420promotion and race there's a lot to unpack there and it's unfortunate that um the trade union
01:48:31.880movement often feels so beholden to the anti-war movement that it's tough to ask those questions
01:48:38.180and it's tough to send those organizers that is that is a difficult uh interesting complication
01:48:43.720one of the one maybe the last thing to touch on here with this whole idea is is is that when it
01:48:49.060comes to the military the military just like other institutions used to be a way of people from the
01:48:54.280lower classes making their way into upper classes or at least finding some kind of equity and maybe
01:48:58.720that's something else that's changed but it's interesting too because it's not as if different
01:49:02.860races or different cultures weren't mixed in the military before case in point being i mean the
01:49:07.360english were very happy to bring the scottish into their ranks that's how they took quebec
01:49:10.780and if we look at america i mean despite only having what less than 25 of the population most
01:49:16.400of the rankers and most a lot of a lot of the u.s military comes from the southern united states
01:49:21.360which still has an honor-based culture so what has gone wrong here and i mean i think it's the
01:49:25.960same thing in canada i think there is very much an honor-based culture inside of aboriginal and
01:49:30.740metis organization so that's being funneled into the military to help bolster it what what is going
01:49:36.600on why why isn't that resulting in those old ways of the institution leveling people up
01:49:41.820Yeah, 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.
01:50:08.220Instead, we go, well, this person had to serve in the military, so there's already something wrong.
01:50:13.440We also really overdo it when we talk about trauma.
01:50:17.400Now, I'm not saying that our veterans hospital system treats trauma as well as it should,
01:50:22.400but we often imagine people who've done military service as permanently damaged and as like damaged goods that you shouldn't handle.
01:50:32.780And 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.
01:50:43.800But 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.
01:50:54.960And on top of that, you probably have a whole bunch of mental illnesses I don't want to see.0.96
01:50:59.500and uh that of course is um and you know it's funny there are we think that the left has a
01:51:09.060big sensitivity culture and certainly we're very sensitive about certain things but
01:51:14.600veterans are one of the groups that you can just disparage that you can just look down your nose
01:51:21.600at that you can just say mean things about with no consequences nobody's gonna stick up for a
01:51:27.020veterans' feelings in the left any more than they're going to stick up for the feelings of
01:51:31.900someone who says, I'm born again in Jesus Christ, right? We love people getting to pick their
01:51:38.020identity unless they pick that one. And we love stories of resilience unless resilience involves
01:51:45.020clawing your way up through the military to make something of yourself. So I think that a lot of
01:51:52.620white collar employment turns up their nose, you know, and right now I'm watching Mad Men with
01:51:59.020my partner and her daughter. And there was, there's a scene in Mad Men where they're watching
01:52:06.860a Western. And I realized that we are as far in time from Mad Men as they were from the Western
01:52:12.400they're watching in the show. That's right. And, but we, you think back to that era and you think
01:52:18.640of the fact that this is what demobilization looked like. It looked like veterans coming
01:52:28.720and taking jobs and being accommodated for the fact that they were traumatized. You see that
01:52:34.380all through Mad Men. You see a lot of excuse making, both good and bad, for the veterans.
01:52:40.040But you also see tremendous respect for the skills they acquired and what they achieved.
01:52:46.100and it's really the 1960s by the time you're at the end of the 1960s liberal society's idea of
01:52:52.580respecting veterans disappears and it really saddened me one of the most saddening things
01:52:59.040for me about the trump movement was seeing the right adopt that same scorn hearing donald trump
01:53:06.720mocking um you can there's a lot to mock about john mccain but the fact that he spent time in
01:53:12.640prisoner of war camp is sure as hell not it the idea that mccain was a chump for having served0.97
01:53:19.520the idea that you know he was dumb for having been captured that he was0.94
01:53:26.640unintelligent and not selling out his guys when he was in the camp it's really disappointing stuff0.81
01:53:33.600and it's really sad to see that that scorn that incubated in the left-wing anti-war movement
01:53:40.640is now spreading through all parts of society including among people i never thought would
01:53:46.880have that kind of disrespect for um people's military service you know my um my partner's
01:53:55.840ex uh he served in kosovo and you know i'm obviously you know the kids know what kind
01:54:04.480of person i am and you know the fact that you know i've been to my share of peace marches and
01:54:10.400blah blah blah and i said i want to make really clear here that your father deciding to serve in
01:54:16.720kosovo um is was a service to me it was a service to all people kosovo if there is any war that we
01:54:26.880can call a good war after the second world war it is the fight to protect those muslim civilians
01:54:34.240in kosovo and in bosnia and yet people don't think about that the anti-war movement went
01:54:42.400out and protested kosovo uh just like everything else and i think it's really unfortunate that um
01:54:51.920we're not thinking we also don't ask questions about what specifically did you do in the forces
01:54:57.040oh you had a quartermaster's spot oh really so you're a bookkeeper you're an accountant you can
01:55:01.680do all these people you know they stop asking questions when they hear military service rather
01:55:07.600than that being an opener to questions so i think that we uh and all and you know the number one
01:55:15.920reason this is not as true in canada but it's more true than you think number one reason given for
01:55:21.920people enlisting in the u.s army is to have medical coverage for their wife's first pregnancy
01:55:27.200There 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.
01:55:42.940and uh yeah i think we're we're at an unfortunate moment when we lose the ability to respect that
01:55:51.120because it goes back to this larger question we keep asking about the efforts to assert ourselves
01:55:57.980as a people in western canada you need a big coalition you need to welcome everyone in and