Western Standard - Mountain Standard Time - May 19, 2021

00:00:00.000 Thank you.

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00:02:30.000 Good morning.

00:02:57.580 There we are.

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00:03:02.720 Hello and welcome to Mountain Standard Time. I'm your host, Nathan Gita.

00:03:05.780 Today, I'll be speaking with Dr. Grant Havers, chair of the philosophy department at Trinity Western University,

00:03:10.700 about the crisis in Toryism that's happening both north and south of the border, throughout all of Anglo-America.

00:03:16.180 We'll talk about that. And in the second half, Stop the Sprays, BC's Jordan Steidl joins us to discuss forestry.

00:03:22.940 A big report came out saying that, hey, after you clear cut, maybe you shouldn't spray down all of the deciduous trees.

00:03:29.080 You might need those later. And the toxins are way too high.

00:03:32.080 So we're going to talk about that then.

00:03:33.640 So remember to like the Western Standard on Facebook to be notified when I'm live.

00:03:37.120 And all of us are live here at the Western Standard.

00:03:39.460 Subscribe to support our content.

00:03:41.100 We're not the CBC. We don't get big checks from the liberals.

00:03:43.840 I don't know why. You'd think they'd like to send us big checks, too.

00:03:46.480 But for some reason, they don't.

00:03:47.680 The big news at the federal level today is that Quebec has decided it can unilaterally change the Canadian constitution.

00:03:54.240 Of course, the habitants would say they are only trying to amend their own constitution,

00:03:59.280 simply taking the law in the direction the facts already point.

00:04:02.860 We are a French culture, a French nation.

00:04:05.280 Why not simply codify this reality into the constitution of the Québécois province?

00:04:10.760 Well, well, or the beautiful province, la belle la Provence. 0.90

00:04:14.780 But this isn't Nam. 0.59

00:04:16.560 This is Canada, and there are rules. Dating all the way back to 1867 and the British North America Act, languages in Canada, that is to say French and English, enjoy equal protections under the law, and it is a legal requirement that people be able to receive services as well as conduct business in either official language of Canada.

00:04:34.880 That's the bedrock of federalism, along with travel, which is an interesting point. With COVID, because of travel restrictions, you've just ruined federalism, let alone religious freedom, which was another bedrock of federalism.

00:04:45.260 I can't really blame the Pepsis for pulling this stunt.

00:04:49.820 Premier Legault, a kind of center-right populist character who helped found Air Transat,

00:04:54.800 this Trumpian move was right up his alley.

00:04:57.440 There's no question.

00:04:58.960 And I'd be disappointed, actually, if he didn't try to make such a play for power.

00:05:02.520 But what's deeply disappointing is that all the federal leaders have become so afraid of Quebec,

00:05:07.260 even the Tories won't utter a peep.

00:05:09.600 It's another blow to O'Toole's integrity, that is to say, the leader, Aaron O'Toole.

00:05:13.640 How long he'll be leader, I don't know.

00:05:15.700 But fresh on the heels of his betrayal of the base

00:05:18.180 when it came to the carbon tax

00:05:20.120 and the fact that he would impose a more complicated system

00:05:22.580 that would end up with a Canadian tire money account on the side.

00:05:26.660 Conservatives used to be the moral conscience of the nation

00:05:29.060 as they were shut out of power for so long

00:05:31.100 they developed a reputation for citing liberal excesses

00:05:33.880 and advocating for more equitable or at least fiscally responsible policy.

00:05:37.780 Today, they're just out there to buy votes,

00:05:39.480 the same as every other party.

00:05:40.980 We in the West might enjoy changing the Constitution

00:05:43.000 as we see fit, discarding equalization and making the Senate equal come to mind.

00:05:47.360 But we are also believers in law and order.

00:05:49.920 St. Thomas Morewell said, it does us no good to remove every law to get at the devil for

00:05:55.020 what laws would hold him back from trying to get me if they were all gone.

00:05:58.980 Peace order and good government are as Canadian as maple syrup.

00:06:01.980 What Quebec is proposing is fundamentally unjust as well as anti-democratic.

00:06:06.540 Our leaders need to call it what it is.

00:06:08.340 Unfortunately, courage is in short supply.

00:06:11.200 So to comment on that a little bit and tell us what's going on when it comes to both Canadian Toryism and Toryism around the world, we're bringing on Dr. Grant Havers.

00:06:21.240 Dr. Grant Havers, it's good to have you on the program.

00:06:23.720 What is going wrong with Toryism in Canada?

00:06:28.160 Good to be here.

00:06:29.280 Well, the Quebec question has always been perhaps a thorn in the side of the Conservative Party, at least since the time in which the Tories hanged Louis Riel.

00:06:47.180 And, of course, there are a lot of historical details to that event.

00:06:51.380 But the Tories have rarely been able to make a breakthrough into Quebec.

00:07:00.660 I think partly because, rightly or wrongly, the Tories have always been perceived as an Anglo party or majority Anglo party, and therefore that invites or provokes suspicion from les Québécois.

00:07:18.080 But Quebec is a real challenge to the Tories and obviously to anybody who believes in federalism the way you appropriately described it.

00:07:31.500 Let me put it this way. Canada is a liberal democracy or a constitutional self-government, whatever term you want to use.

00:07:42.380 And one of the most basic principles to that kind of regime is equality before the law.

00:07:48.640 that all human beings at least all rational adult human beings are supposed to be equal before the

00:07:56.320 law so what that means uh regarding federal provincial relations is that one province

00:08:03.760 cannot have more power than the other or the citizens of one province cannot have

00:08:09.680 more rights than the other so i would think from a traditional conservative perspective

00:08:18.560 it's very hard to reconcile equality before the law as a principle with the principle that

00:08:25.840 some groups or some provinces have more rights than others uh i i don't see how that uh that

00:08:33.280 contradiction can be addressed by any political party uh so that's always been a challenge in

00:08:40.320 the history of canada and and certainly a challenge to the the conservative party

00:08:46.160 and and going all the way back to the founding of canada and and the negotiations and the horse

00:08:51.120 trading that was happening to to get this nation off the ground something something that needs to

00:08:57.200 be highlighted here too is that while it was always acknowledged that quebec was going to

00:09:01.360 be different and of course it was a catholic and french nation inside of the rest of canada that

00:09:07.120 was understood from the very beginning as this populace would be a nucleus and it would be

00:09:11.600 different and it was never going to be completely amalgamated into anglo canada and certainly anglo

00:09:17.120 protestant canada orangeman canada which was pretty strong in certain parts of of toronto what's now

00:09:22.480 known as toronto today um the the problem though is that it's one thing to acknowledge those things

00:09:28.880 it's another thing for either side to put their thumb on the scale what do you think is is happening

00:09:33.520 here why is legoe making this move does he just see an opportunity or has has has quebec really

00:09:40.080 gotten to the point where it's so arrogant it thinks no i can just get away whatever i want

00:09:43.680 no one no one's going to stop me well legoe's move is just the latest chapter in the history

00:09:50.720 of Quebec, or at least governments in Quebec, acting on their own or acting as if they are

00:09:59.380 already a nation state. And I don't mean that as a criticism. I can understand why many Quebecers

00:10:08.220 feel that way. I mean, this goes as far back as Duplessis, who certainly believed in federalism

00:10:17.500 more so than his many of his successors but uh even duplicy thought that quebec

00:10:25.420 uh was separate separate but equal but separate nonetheless and uh and acted uh as if the federal

00:10:34.700 government was secondary to the decisions that quebec um ought to make uh so uh this is just the

00:10:43.260 the latest uh development in a history of quebec uh going its own way uh i should add

00:10:50.460 too that i i don't think the liberals have any magic solutions uh to this problem uh i mean

00:10:57.500 pierre trudeau trudeau the elder uh thought of course that if the country became officially

00:11:04.460 bilingual or if there was equal protection of both uh languages both french and english across

00:11:12.700 canada then somehow that would neutralize uh the separatist threat in quebec but also reassure

00:11:20.140 quebec about its place uh in the rest of canada and it seems to me that most quebecers certainly

00:11:28.140 those who lean towards sovereignty or sovereignty association could care less about bilingualism

00:11:34.300 that that was an irrelevant answer to this problem so i just think that whoever's in power

00:11:44.820 in ottawa whether liberal or or conservative quebec will continue to go its own way

00:11:52.480 yeah absolutely i understand something something that's kind of needs to be clarified

00:12:00.780 is particularly I think the issue of the Tory response to this so we had so the obvious players

00:12:09.640 played into what Legault was doing I mean Trudeau was never going to counter Legault he needs those

00:12:14.380 seats in the coming election neither neither was Jagmeet going to counter Trudeau at least as far

00:12:19.320 as I know his statement hasn't counted him nobody is going to counter him and then it came down to

00:12:23.580 the Tories so the Tories why why did they not do what they've done many times before I mean they

00:12:30.420 were kind of the conscience of the nation for all those years they were shut out between

00:12:34.560 Diefenbaker and finally Mulroney and even from Mulroney to Harper the Tories the right side the

00:12:40.240 right wing parties of this country kind of developed their their understanding around hey

00:12:45.460 we are going to we we are at least if we can't have power then we're going to be a loyal opposition

00:12:50.540 that at least points out that there are things about this country that need to be protected and

00:12:55.000 We're not going to allow them to be trespassed.

00:12:56.600 And now Aaron O'Toole has betrayed that legacy by saying, no, these equal protections don't matter to me.

00:13:02.740 So apparently he's vote buying as well.

00:13:05.640 Right. And that's a very dangerous tactic because, of course, the rest of Canada or what many Quebecers call the rock are not happy about that unequal treatment.

00:13:17.420 But, yeah, I think there are two reasons, one of which you've already hit upon.

00:13:20.720 And the Tories are just afraid to alienate Quebec or to be portrayed as bigoted or xenophobic or just insensitive.

00:13:31.520 But I think the other reason, which is equally political, is that the Tories historically have sometimes enjoyed or benefited from kind of the conservative populist vote that often springs up in rural Quebec.

00:13:51.640 So obviously I'm not talking about the island of Montreal. That is Tory-free. They'll never put a dent into capturing Montreal. But the Tories occasionally, certainly under Mulroney and to some extent Harper, have benefited from that populist right-wing vote.

00:14:11.920 Of course, that vote is kind of a mixed blessing because sometimes populist right-wingers in Quebec, I shouldn't say sometimes, I'd say most of the time, lean towards more powers for Quebec or a greater measure of sovereignty for Quebec.

00:14:34.540 So it's a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the Tories have been able to harvest votes from that bloc. On the other hand, at some point, they have to make a choice about whether they believe in federalism for everyone or whether they're going to accommodate this populist vote in Quebec. So they're in a bit of a pickle.

00:14:55.940 i understand um it i think i think that there's another piece to this as well is that

00:15:04.700 as they as the tories kind of wrestle with their identity on this and as as quebec asserts itself

00:15:10.400 now the west might have some questions of its own like why can't they unilaterally change their

00:15:16.160 constitutions i mean i'm sure they'd love to do something about equalization i'm sure they'd like

00:15:20.660 do something about the senate uh why can't the west just totally decouple itself from from the

00:15:27.220 consensus of 1867 or even 1982 and be like no you know what like we run the show now and we're going

00:15:33.860 to do whatever we want to do well that's right that's a danger facing uh all political parties

00:15:41.860 in in canada uh namely the the danger of a domino effect uh in which some provinces probably the

00:15:49.620 western ones will say look why can't we uh enjoy a measure of sovereignty uh or or something even

00:15:58.340 uh more more dramatic uh like the separation uh the way that quebec uh has sometimes acted and

00:16:07.300 and that's a real question i i don't think uh the federal liberals have an answer to that

00:16:13.460 at all uh they as you know they they have a pretty poor record of understanding the west

00:16:20.020 this goes at least as far back as uh pierre trudeau so uh yeah i i think in a liberal democracy one

00:16:30.660 that is officially committed to equality before the law any kind of double standard especially

00:16:36.820 in a time of stress and instability uh will just not be tolerated uh indefinitely and uh

00:16:47.460 again the liberals don't have an answer to that i i don't think the tories do either i'm not sure

00:16:52.820 that mr o'toole really understands the west i mean you mentioned the the carbon tax the new carbon

00:17:00.100 tax measure that um he has proposed so uh yeah growing western alienation is a a real thing

00:17:10.660 and uh unless both major federal parties can answer the question uh what exactly unites us

00:17:19.860 as a country i think we're going to be uh be facing some real turbulence and instability down

00:17:27.380 the road i completely agree the question though becomes what would that new political arrangement

00:17:34.420 look like i never thought i'd be the guy on a show that was based on western sovereignty again

00:17:40.420 i've as i've said many times on this show uh i'm i ambivalent about the question of federalism i i

00:17:46.740 prefer the external borders of canada i think the internal borders need to change but to that end

00:17:52.020 like i just said i never thought i'd be the guy on a show somewhere explaining that i wanted to

00:17:56.180 become yugoslavia but some kind of loosely confederated entity that is more like an empire

00:18:03.220 with its various stretched out arms than a then than a tightly federalized system that we've

00:18:08.740 attempted for 150 years but it's falling apart now i i don't i don't know how to advocate for

00:18:14.260 that without sounding insane but i think we might need an austro-hungarian empire and not what we

00:18:20.100 have today yeah and of course that empire had its own problems uh leading up to world war one but we

00:18:28.420 we don't have to get into that but uh yeah i think you're right and uh canadians especially canadians

00:18:34.340 in government need to understand the original uh raison d'etre of canada i mean unlike the united

00:18:41.300 states uh we're not a country based on uh high principle or propositions that were immortalized

00:18:51.860 like propositional truths that were immortalized through the declaration of independence

00:18:56.820 nor are we like european countries that have a very homogeneous ethnic identity that has a shared

00:19:05.140 history and language that keeps the country together we don't fit into either the european

00:19:09.780 or american model i mean what really has historically been the basis of canada is

00:19:16.500 sound economic policy and i think john a mcdonald understood this very well that uh

00:19:23.540 it wasn't about uh political philosophy as in the united states and it wasn't about

00:19:29.380 homogeneous identities it was about making sure that all regions of the country benefited

00:19:36.660 economically and that's really the glue that is supposed to keep the country together but

00:19:42.740 if certain regions of the country don't feel that confederation benefits them in any economic sense

00:19:51.940 then we're in trouble and again the absence of a national narrative just adds to that uncertainty

00:20:01.620 and disdain over confederation so again i i i think the question of economics uh

00:20:11.460 uh has to be addressed here i completely agree i completely agree and and that i think is it's

00:20:19.460 pretty clear that when there are economic shocks in this country that's when there are even when

00:20:24.180 it's economic prosperity too but like because i mean there was a lot of separatist sentiment

00:20:28.340 during the first world war and obviously quebec was benefiting from the first world war they were

00:20:32.660 getting a lot of pay out of out of that situation but but unrest uh with economic uncertainty in

00:20:39.300 this country is a very real thing and covid has not helped this and neither has the trudeau government

00:20:46.580 well no that's right i mean in the best of times all political parties

00:20:50.500 are kept together or hang together because of loose coalitions. I mean, that's true of the

00:20:59.120 Liberal Party. It's true of the Conservative Party. And those coalitions, which often have

00:21:05.960 different agenda or the people making up the coalitions may have different agenda or different

00:21:13.180 concerns. They only hang together if times are prosperous or if times are peaceful.

00:21:24.180 But coalitions can break apart in times of anxiety and instability. So I mentioned that

00:21:31.380 because the Conservative Party of Canada has always been kind of a loose coalition of small

00:21:37.540 business, Western populists, obviously voting blocs in Ontario and Quebec, to some extent,

00:21:47.380 all of whom have different interests or may even understand conservatism differently.

00:21:53.080 And again, in times of prosperity, those differences may not matter.

00:21:57.620 It may not matter that there can be these differences.

00:22:03.840 But in a time of instability, these coalitions are very fragile and can be vulnerable to things like separatism or just a province going its own way.

00:22:18.480 Maybe let's pivot a little bit now to what's happening in the United States.

00:22:22.480 So we are now six months out from, well, the end of the Trump presidency and so far that that was when the election was called.

00:22:31.580 So we're getting towards that point now.

00:22:33.840 the election having been called for biden about a week after the uh five five to seven days after

00:22:40.000 the initial voting um the and of course there was the stop to steal campaign and then there was the

00:22:45.840 january 6 riots and all that stuff that's all starting to feel like ancient history now as we

00:22:49.680 get into the end of may and into june but but within the republican party it's only yesterday

00:22:55.600 so the conserved party of the united states the right-wing party of the united states is is

00:22:59.440 struggling to find its identity is it going to stick with its former president now at the winter

00:23:05.460 white house in mar-a-lago taking meetings talking with people starting his own social media company

00:23:11.260 supposedly making statements and pronouncements almost like an opposition leader against

00:23:15.620 president biden which of course is different for american politics today they don't have a

00:23:21.560 parliamentary system they have a congressional system so the idea of there being a leader of

00:23:24.980 opposition it's a very different sort of understanding there what what's going to

00:23:29.140 happen to the republican party is it going to remain the party of donald trump or are they

00:23:33.300 going to move on uh yeah the quick answer is who knows but my best guess is that uh

00:23:43.620 eventually they will they will have to move beyond uh i i guess the the trump personality cult

00:23:53.060 uh for for different reasons but uh i i i think the republican party cannot move beyond

00:24:01.780 uh the kind of populist base that was built up during the trump era they cannot afford to lose

00:24:10.020 that base which is uh largely made up of not just small business people but also work

00:24:16.500 yeah working people people who are working and uh class america until the rise of trump

00:24:27.140 uh so i mean there'll always be a wing of the republican party that uh wants to get beyond not

00:24:36.020 just trump but also populism but i i think uh they'll be increasingly marginalized and now

00:24:41.700 there's talk that these more liberal Republicans or anti-Trump Republicans might even form their

00:24:48.640 own party. I would say good luck with that, because there is no voting bloc in the United

00:24:53.680 States that will support a breakaway anti-populist Republican Party. That idea is just pure fantasy.

00:25:03.500 So I think the Republicans, just for the sake of re-energizing themselves, have to get beyond Trump, although they have to be careful about how they do that.

00:25:14.760 But they have to hang on to that populist vote.

00:25:17.120 They've got to hang on to the working class that voted Republican in the time of Trump.

00:25:26.900 Hopefully they'll do that if they're smart.

00:25:30.020 yeah if and if they can politically strategize how to do that but the thing is

00:25:34.660 i think that's kind of the bargain they have to make they have to stick with the greatest showman

00:25:40.020 the man the man who managed to bring in these reagan democrats back into the party uh people

00:25:46.060 who felt alienated people who you know it's funny because we we watched we watch uh roseanne that's

00:25:51.640 always one of my favorite references right there's roseanne right and you're watching roseanne you've

00:25:55.540 got some you know i guess it could have been reagan democrats or definitely clinton working

00:25:59.640 class voters right like they wanted you know third way policies or working class people they

00:26:04.160 want to help their children they want their schools to be open and then somehow both establishments

00:26:10.160 democrat and republican bought so hard into neoliberalism and shipping jobs overseas and

00:26:15.640 defunding uh the public services that people need that that it took trump to come in and and and

00:26:21.340 question that. It's kind of incredible. Even after a socialist was supposedly president,

00:26:27.440 though I think that's a bit of a mischaracterization of Obama, they needed to bring in a reality TV

00:26:34.400 show star to try and bring back the forgotten man speech. How did that happen, Dr. Hayward?

00:26:41.280 Well, I think it happened because the Republican Party blazed a trail for Donald Trump. And I know

00:26:46.940 the Republican establishment doesn't want to admit that. They don't want to admit that they're

00:26:51.540 partly responsible for the rise of Trump. But like you mentioned, the Republican Party,

00:26:57.520 but also the Democrats, have endorsed so-called free trade policies that didn't do much good for

00:27:05.300 working class Americans. And then both parties, I'm thinking of the second Iraq war in particular,

00:27:14.200 have supported imperial adventurism in foreign policy or endless wars for democracy,

00:27:23.160 which have failed. We just have to look at Afghanistan today. And of course, none of that

00:27:30.360 helped to attract working class voters to the Republican Party. So Trump came in

00:27:37.920 And as you mentioned, he denounced neoliberal or free trade policies.

00:27:42.980 But he's also proud of the fact that he never got America involved in another war that is costly in terms of blood and treasure.

00:27:54.060 I think in one of his last speeches before he left the White House, he proudly said that he hadn't got America involved in another destructive war.

00:28:04.620 So I think that's why Trump was able to perpetrate this hostile takeover against the Republican Party, because the Republican establishment, I think to this day, still doesn't understand its own base.

00:28:21.960 And I just find that mind boggling. At least the Democratic establishment understands its base, which is probably why it's more successful.

00:28:29.360 But the Republican establishment still seems to think that most voters want free trade policies and there should be more intervention around the world to spread democracy.

00:28:44.040 I mean, some of that sentiment has been chastened because of the Trump era, but Trump understood the base so well.

00:28:54.120 And if anybody's going to replace Trump, it's got to be another populist who has his appeal, but also his animal cunning in terms of understanding what working class and small business Americans want.

00:29:11.700 and i i'm not sure that a replacement is in the offing it's it is a difficult task ahead my own

00:29:20.340 my own personal bet and this is calling it way out i mean i called i mean i actually called it

00:29:25.860 what was it this is the it was 2016 this five years ago this may i called trump's election in

00:29:31.380 may of 2016 um and i was proven right there uh obviously my call for it this coming this this

00:29:37.460 last election cycle though i do have some questions about where some of these votes came from

00:29:42.260 uh was wrong or prove it proved forced to be wrong by somebody somewhere but i think that i think that

00:29:48.020 my call now would be what's going to happen with this sec with this other run perhaps by trump or

00:29:53.460 not i think the trumpian candidate is going to be blessed by president trump i think it might be

00:29:58.500 de santis the governor of florida who of course with his anti-lockdown mentality has kind of saved

00:30:03.780 his state between him and maybe christy noma as his vice presidential pick as kind of this bizarre

00:30:09.700 pivot where all of a sudden florida's the new california cal i mean you you would remember

00:30:14.820 better than i not to mention your age dr avers but you would remember better than i what happened

00:30:20.340 california used to be a republican state it used to be a strong republican state and then something

00:30:24.820 happened to it is the story of california kind of the story maybe of what's gone wrong in the

00:30:29.620 in the United States generally. Yeah, well, Californication sweep the nation. Yeah, that's

00:30:37.180 interesting. You're right. I am old enough to remember when California was reliably Republican,

00:30:42.640 had a very strong economy rooted in the manufacturing sector, which was able to lift

00:30:48.580 so many working class people into the middle class. Now, as you know, it's strongly Democratic.

00:30:54.160 the middle class is shrinking in California, and big tech, the big tech companies have replaced

00:31:01.820 the manufacturing sector. And of course, big tech certainly makes a lot of money for itself,

00:31:10.000 but doesn't produce a middle class. And in fact, it's quite happy to survive on a proletariat or

00:31:18.560 a precariat of workers who are not in the middle class. So, yeah, I think many Republicans fear

00:31:27.360 that California is kind of a bellwether for the rest of the country. They should also be worried

00:31:34.180 about Texas. I mean, Texas may be moving into the Democratic column, partly because of the

00:31:43.620 immigration issue. And of course, most immigrants from the developing world generally vote Democrat.

00:31:51.220 I don't think there's anything controversial about that. If the Republicans lose Texas,

00:31:57.460 it's over. They will never be able to win a federal victory or a presidential victory again.

00:32:06.400 so i i think the more enlightened republicans uh understand this and certainly trump did

00:32:14.040 uh but that's right uh all it takes are are a few states to go the way of of california

00:32:21.660 and uh the republican party will be finished yeah that purpling that purpling georgia is

00:32:28.360 purpled as i think mark stein put it once they're purpling in texas they're purpling in

00:32:32.420 in georgia what's going to happen next i maybe maybe kind of pulling back from all of it for

00:32:38.280 just a moment is what we've been here since 2016 we're now five years into the the disruption uh

00:32:46.880 the the politics of disruption as people said that the discourses that have been disrupted

00:32:51.020 whatever projects were underway come 2015 into 2016 one way or another things have kind of gone

00:32:57.160 sideways for those ruling elites in that way for a long time, half a decade now. Brexit was that

00:33:06.000 signal. So was the Trump presidency and the Trump election. Before that, we saw the unrest, the

00:33:11.460 popular unrest when it came to the austerity, both in England, but also throughout Europe after the

00:33:17.120 Euro crisis and the financial crisis in the United States. Why is there such a disconnect between

00:33:24.240 those who are in charge and the people on the ground and particularly if we even look at canada

00:33:29.340 it seems to be like particularly right-wing premiers are the most disconnected from their

00:33:34.420 populace somehow ford is more hated than than john horgan is same with kenny that and pallister for

00:33:42.060 that matter that somehow on the right this this disruption of discourse has has gotten worse what

00:33:48.240 what happened globally and then maybe more locally why isn't there why is there this disconnect

00:33:53.260 well i i think this disconnect goes back to the failure of of some leaders on the right to

00:34:03.200 understand their own voting base so i i mentioned uh the working class and uh small business people

00:34:10.100 and unfortunately this is a pattern uh in the history of the of the right at least recent

00:34:16.460 history, with a few exceptions, that the establishment right, as I would call it,

00:34:24.240 has trouble relating to the working class. Now, in fairness, I would say the federal liberals and

00:34:32.100 the NDP have that problem too, which is embarrassing for the NDP because they're

00:34:37.160 supposed to be the party of the working class. And the Democrats have seemed to lost touch with

00:34:43.780 their uh their uh traditional constituency the working class so this is a problem that applies

00:34:50.660 to all uh political parties but i think in general uh elites across the world i don't just mean

00:34:56.900 government elites or political ones but also corporate elites no longer really believe in

00:35:02.740 the nation state or no longer really have local loyalties or attachments they certainly prize

00:35:10.340 social mobility. They certainly love the fact that they can move their money around the world

00:35:18.340 with just a flick of the button on the keyboard. That's very different from the elites of the old

00:35:25.800 days. I don't want to romanticize those days, but the wealthiest people that tended to govern

00:35:34.380 candidate in the United States in the late 19th, early 20th century, I think were more attached

00:35:40.560 to their countries, largely because they weren't as mobile. They couldn't just move their money

00:35:47.980 around. They couldn't just live wherever they liked. And so they had to demonstrate a commitment

00:35:54.640 to their nations, sometimes through philanthropy or other ventures. But the elites in our own time,

00:36:03.620 uh the managerial elites uh they see themselves not as citizens but as uh participants in the

00:36:11.780 global village and uh and therefore they they see nationalism as kind of a dangerous

00:36:19.300 and uh archaic threat that should just go away so i i think in general you you you do have this kind

00:36:27.620 of cosmopolitan attitude that uh we we should represent the world we we should not represent

00:36:36.180 uh our national loyalties and of course they profit uh from that attitude as well but in

00:36:42.660 the process they they ignore uh the the concerns of the working classes in their countries

00:36:50.580 it's interesting because again we we've been through a gilded age before

00:36:55.140 We named it such. It looks like we're headed towards another one, especially with the disparity in wealth that's growing. The last Gilded Age, it didn't end in the same kind of destruction as previous ones did or previous moments of disparity. I'm thinking of the French Revolution. I'm thinking of other moments in history.

00:37:15.040 that gilded age while in europe certainly the returns to fascism and totalitarianism

00:37:19.980 it didn't happen everywhere and it didn't happen in the anglosphere which is interesting

00:37:24.760 do you predict that we'll survive this gilded age the same way we did last time or is there

00:37:30.400 going to be a fundamental pivot to a more totalitarian style of government even in anglo

00:37:34.880 america yeah i'm reluctant to uh make predictions but uh here's a maybe a best guess i i would think

00:37:44.960 the real authoritarian threat today tends to come from the left. And I wouldn't call this

00:37:55.140 a left-wing version of fascism necessarily, but I think many people on the left, in forgetting

00:38:03.020 their movements, historic commitment to the working class, are very comfortable with giving

00:38:11.200 governments and big tech enormous surveillance powers to spy on the population and de-platform

00:38:20.900 people who oppose their ideology. So I think we have a different left today that is not just cut

00:38:30.620 off from the working class, but it's quite comfortable with a Leviathan state that likes

00:38:37.820 to monitor people and uses big tech to censor people as well. So I think that's where the

00:38:43.600 authoritarianism is coming from. I mean, when was the last time that cancel culture applied to 0.99

00:38:49.240 somebody on the left? I guess it happens occasionally, but as you know, overwhelmingly

00:38:54.540 cancel culture applies to the right. So I would think the right in some parts of Europe or perhaps 0.83

00:39:05.260 the United States has some authoritarian elements, but they're not the predominant elements of the

00:39:11.280 right. I think the right is fighting a defensive war. The right is trying to preserve what is left

00:39:19.200 of traditional liberties and traditional constitutional government, and they have a

00:39:24.780 real uphill battle that they're fighting in the process. So the right is trying to fight for

00:39:30.500 survival uh i i don't think that they're in a position even if they wanted to be to uh recreate

00:39:38.340 the kind of mass fascist movements that uh characterize the 1920s and 30s so i i think the

00:39:46.980 danger of uh of abuse of power uh in an authoritarian direction is is more so on the left

00:39:56.020 so there won't be an english-speaking franco is what you're saying

00:40:00.360 no i wouldn't hold my breath

00:40:03.280 let's talk a little bit about what is a little what is closer to home with with in particular

00:40:11.240 the disconnect between the three the three kind of most well-known right-wing premiers that we have

00:40:16.640 uh two in the west and one in ontario ford pallister and kenny most most recently kenny

00:40:22.180 appearing to lose control of his caucus it appears that kenny may very well be on his way out

00:40:28.180 it each of these people made different decisions they resulted in different problems maybe the

00:40:34.580 press is scrutinizing right-wing uh premiers more than it would left-wing or conservative

00:40:39.300 premiers more than it would liberal ones or progressive ones or ndp ones but but nonetheless

00:40:44.820 even even i you know when i'm cross-examined by my friends who live in these areas of course we're

00:40:49.780 in british columbia both of us speaking for british columbia today but when i talk to people

00:40:54.100 who live in alberta manitoba or ontario they even if they're sympathetic to say a conservative or pc

00:41:02.260 candidate they they hate what they're living under and i have to admit that i wouldn't have a lot of

00:41:08.980 mercy on my particular leader as well if i happen to live in those districts what has happened here

00:41:14.580 Why on the right has there been this complete disconnect with their base and ultimately a betrayal of their base?

00:41:21.440 We've seen this federally already, but now through COVID, even the idea of maybe trying to use some more freedom-loving sort of methods or individual sort of solutions to these problems,

00:41:32.120 they've completely caved and they've lost both the people that were never going to vote for them and the people who already voted for them.

00:41:39.980 Yeah, and sad to say, this is a pattern in the history of the right.

00:41:44.580 uh on both sides of the border uh a famous american conservative thinker wilmore kendall

00:41:51.220 once said that the right uh never retrieves its wounded which is a depressing thought to

00:41:58.740 contemplate but for a long time uh the right in a way has been its own enemy because once uh right

00:42:07.060 wing parties uh get into power they they generally abandon uh the uh ideology that um attracted

00:42:17.380 voters in the in the first place uh you can see that in the history uh of the american right uh

00:42:24.660 that uh once upon a time the american right was uh quite opposed to uh interventionist foreign

00:42:32.020 policies. And as we said, Trump benefited from that voting bloc. But there are many establishment

00:42:42.740 conservatives who get into power and embrace interventionism. I'm sorry if I'm going back

00:42:52.200 to the American context, but I remember when George W. Bush was debating Al Gore, he said

00:42:58.660 America should not be a nation building nation or something like that. We should avoid that sort of

00:43:05.260 thing. And then, of course, the second Iraq war came along. So you see parallels in Canada, too,

00:43:13.260 that often Tories or conservatives that get elected do not realize or forget about why they

00:43:22.520 got elected in the first place. I mean, most people who vote on the right are sick and tired

00:43:28.760 of the surveillance state. They're tired of being monitored and spied on and being de-platformed.

00:43:39.000 I'm encouraged by the fact that O'Toole is making an issue out of C-10, that internet bill that the

00:43:47.240 liberals are proposing that has some implications for uh free speech on the internet i think they

00:43:54.200 need to do more of that uh and and uh if i had any advice for conservative parties especially

00:44:01.720 the federal one it is to present themselves as the freedom party in which it's okay to have the

00:44:09.160 freedom to disagree with each other it's okay uh to question the government it's okay uh to uh

00:44:18.760 cherish one's liberties um i i think that would be effective propaganda against the left

00:44:25.800 right now but uh tories uh at least uh tories in our governments have not done enough of that

00:44:34.760 and they need to do more and and it's a communications issue as well it's that that

00:44:42.200 for some reason they'll communicate and and campaign as populist and as the freedom party

00:44:47.160 as you just mentioned that they'll campaign in that respect but where where is the meat of the

00:44:53.320 issue even with harper the further we get away from harper's legacy like god god bless him and

00:44:57.880 everything and i mean it's it's it's a sin to complain against harper and toryism but but the

00:45:03.000 The further we get away from it, the redder, the more red Tory his legacy gets.

00:45:07.960 It wasn't actually the populist thing that everybody remembers.

00:45:11.940 We still have gun legislation that he promised to get rid of.

00:45:15.700 We still have a Senate that's not equal.

00:45:18.980 We still have taxation that's still exorbitant.

00:45:22.580 Boutique tax credits weren't going to do enough.

00:45:24.980 We needed to literally cut taxes to the point where raising them again to the same rates as before would have caused a rebellion.

00:45:32.200 People would have been marching in the street.

00:45:34.260 But none of those things happened.

00:45:35.340 Cutting the CBC didn't happen.

00:45:37.180 Why don't conservatives rule as boldly as their liberal opposition?

00:45:44.280 Well, those are all valid questions.

00:45:46.940 I think, I mean, to go back to what we earlier discussed, the federal Tories are afraid of alienating Quebec.

00:45:56.300 They're afraid of alienating the 905 district in southern Ontario.

00:46:02.200 both of which tend to be more comfortable with an interventionist state or with a state

00:46:10.520 that the federal liberals have built up over time. And that leads to the strategy of being

00:46:17.960 a Me Too liberal. I mean, there are many Tories who think that they should just abandon

00:46:23.880 right-wing rhetoric altogether or conservative policies because they think these policies are

00:46:34.880 doomed or they're not going to get any traction in certain parts of Canada. And that's partly true.

00:46:43.720 But they're not going to win if they're just a faint echo of the Liberal Party. That is even more of a losing strategy.

00:46:57.080 So, again, I would think that Tories, especially electorate Tories, have to build some backbone and realize that many Canadians, maybe not all, maybe just a plurality, but many Canadians want more freedom.

00:47:17.560 They want the freedom to be able to disagree without losing their careers or their reputations.

00:47:26.440 And again, I think Tories have to push back on the absolute intolerance that parties on the left in Canada have been manifesting for a long time.

00:47:37.820 I mean, for all the talk about tolerance and diversity, generally left-leaning parties could care less about those things.

00:47:46.160 they think in monolithic terms they don't tolerate the freedom to to disagree etc so i i think the

00:47:53.440 tories could do a lot more but this will take courage uh and they have to realize they're

00:47:59.360 going to lose some votes uh in the process but uh so be it and and kind of find new ones i mean

00:48:08.320 that was the other thing that got well we're looking at that we saw turnout for the brexit

00:48:13.280 vote that that we'd never seen before and then we saw when the tories became the party of brexit

00:48:18.800 that they were taking labor strongholds things that hadn't changed color since since uh the

00:48:24.960 gilded age since the 20s and the 30s and the founding of the labor party in britain we saw

00:48:31.040 the same thing happened with trump the blue wall was broken uh even this last time whatever one

00:48:36.400 wants to say about integrity lack thereof of the election uh that was extremely close in in all of

00:48:44.400 those places and could have well well gone the other way it this is the reality this is the

00:48:50.620 reality there is another voting block out there there's a huge amount of people out there i mean

00:48:56.000 trump has increased his votes by the most incumbent president of all time instead of going down he

00:49:01.580 went up by something like 11 million votes and so there really is an entire other group of people

00:49:08.260 out there that somehow conservatives are just not talking to why why aren't they why aren't they

00:49:13.740 reaching out why aren't they evangelizing why aren't they spreading the ideas of toryism of

00:49:18.480 of whether you are more on the throne and altar side whether it is more of a the commons and and

00:49:23.880 the common good side or even if you are on the more uh classical liberal and and the free market

00:49:28.860 side there's a real story and a compelling narrative but conservatives just seem to be

00:49:33.420 incapable of communicating it yeah i think it's because on both sides of the border let's say

00:49:39.900 tories and republicans uh they're just afraid they they think the the left is on the right side

00:49:47.340 of history at least the winning side of history and uh i think some tory and republican strategists

00:49:54.220 think that they had that by appealing to the left uh somehow that will gain them power and i i think

00:50:02.300 that's pure fantasy because generally people on the left will always vote on the left and uh tories

00:50:10.220 and republicans uh like the establishment uh versions need to understand that so uh for you

00:50:19.660 mentioned uh britain and and uh how labor is losing the working class vote

00:50:25.180 um i mean there are politicians in britain who believe that

00:50:29.660 uh critical race theory is is perhaps a vote gutter

00:50:33.740 uh that by encouraging the perception that britain is fundamentally racist

00:50:39.580 that all of its institutions are racist that it needs to be rebuilt

00:50:43.740 from the ground up that somehow that's a vote gutter and it's not

00:50:47.580 uh the english working class or the the working class of the uk uh generally can't stand uh

00:50:55.100 ideologies like critical race theory so there's i mean in purely political terms there's no point

00:51:02.460 in endorsing an ideology like that in the hope uh hopes of uh gaining votes uh but again as you

00:51:12.140 mentioned there's this disconnect between leaders and and the populist base and i again i i give

00:51:19.340 credit to trump uh for understanding that uh the base doesn't uh dig ideologies like uh critical

00:51:29.260 race theory it's not that we should deny the history of racism in uh western democracies but

00:51:37.500 But the radicalism of something like critical race theory, to say the least, is not a vote

00:51:44.700 getter.

00:51:45.220 So I think Tories and Republicans need to understand that by cozying up to the left,

00:51:51.660 they are wasting their time.

00:51:54.120 It would be far more effective to actually stick to conservative principles and win votes

00:52:02.080 that way.

00:52:02.580 and and i believe that a coalition there can be built um maybe that's the that's kind of the

00:52:11.520 final point to bring up here is with with canada again you know a loosely confederated entity what

00:52:18.260 that might look like or how to how to appeal to all corners of that country with with with the

00:52:25.060 tory ideal i really do believe there is a way to get maybe it can't be done in toronto proper but

00:52:32.300 But throughout the rest of Canada, there is a real possibility of building a coalition of 51% and taking parliament and trying to reform this country.

00:52:42.600 If that 51% is out there somewhere, what are the principles that you believe, Dr. Havers, that need to be put forward in order to bring them into the big blue tent and make Canada a better place?

00:52:55.360 Well, I think one principle would be to win back or at least keep that working class populist

00:53:08.560 vote. And again, I fear that many elected Tories will lose that vote, partly because they'll

00:53:18.660 endorse economic policies, like tax cuts for the very wealthy, that will not please that working

00:53:29.500 class base. So I think they have to promote themselves more as a populist party, not in any

00:53:39.320 ethno-racialist sense. I mean, that would be a disaster. But a populist party that is

00:53:47.200 more conducive or more beneficial to the working class and small business vote.

00:53:59.620 They need to expand their appeal on that.

00:54:04.240 And I think focusing on economic issues is always a good start, developing economic policies

00:54:12.140 that will actually grow the middle class, that will bring working class people into the middle

00:54:19.420 class, and at the same time hit the liberals and the NDP hard on their ideological intolerance,

00:54:27.600 on their unwillingness to tolerate the freedom to disagree. I think if you

00:54:35.120 combined those principles together, you probably could get a winning coalition.

00:54:42.140 well amen i mean it's we can't we can't go on like this with one and a half parties and we

00:54:49.000 certainly can't go on with the consensus that we've had these last hundred and well that's what

00:54:53.920 it feels like anyways the 88 of the of the 110 years as uh conrad black lord conrad black likes

00:55:00.400 to uh reference all the time in his column the the liberal consensus and the laurentian consensus

00:55:05.140 in canada is is killing canada to the point where even its traditional strongholds like as we're

00:55:10.140 noting now with Quebec are rebelling. They're doing whatever they want, and they're doing it

00:55:15.340 with impunity. Maybe as a final point, Dr. Havers, do you think that the Canada that we know today,

00:55:24.600 do you think that will be here in 50 years? I have no idea, but I would think that it's 0.73

00:55:33.160 It's entirely probable that conflicts that are not just regional, but perhaps even tribalistic

00:55:44.100 will engulf Canada and certainly engulf the United States.

00:55:50.000 I think the big question that conservatives on both sides of the border need to answer

00:55:55.320 is what exactly unites us or what exactly unites a a majority of americans or canadians if they

00:56:05.440 can't answer that question not that other parties can necessarily answer it uh then we're in trouble

00:56:11.280 uh because it's always been difficult for canadians to uh address that question what

00:56:17.820 actually keeps the country together and i i think among other things a a sound economy that benefits

00:56:24.120 all regions uh keeps the the country together but i i also think that if we abandon equality before

00:56:31.320 the law or the rule of law then uh we're not going to have a country where we're going to have

00:56:46.520 i think uh dr havers has frozen there for a moment he might come back it was came back a

00:56:52.360 a moment later but uh we are going to be pivoting pretty quick here so if that's uh goodbye to dr

00:56:58.360 havers uh that that that will happen while we wait just a moment for either uh either there we go

00:57:07.560 hold on looks like you're back you're back sorry i'll have to let you i'll tell you repeat your

00:57:14.520 point there because we lost you for a moment yeah i think the possibility of canada and the united

00:57:21.880 States splitting apart is there, as long as the economy, certainly in Canada, does not benefit

00:57:32.760 all regions, or as long as economic policies do not benefit all regions, and as long as

00:57:39.500 equality before the law is no longer taken seriously, as long as that situation persists,

00:57:49.140 I think many Canadians will ask themselves, well, what are we?

00:57:54.140 Are we a country anymore?

00:57:56.880 Does anything unite us anymore?

00:57:59.560 I think these are real dangers that could lead to the splitting up of Canada.

00:58:07.680 Well, hopefully it doesn't come to that, but it may very well.

00:58:11.880 And of course, this channel is dedicated to some of those questions, and we're thankful to have opinions thereof.

00:58:19.140 uh dr havers thank you so much for coming on and uh sharing your wisdom with us today we'll have

00:58:23.940 you on again soon i'm sure to talk more to us about what's what's going right and mostly wrong

00:58:29.460 in toryism thanks for having me absolutely thank you dr havers well we're going to uh spend a few

00:58:38.580 minutes here kind of dwelling on what went sideways there with quebec and some of the

00:58:42.900 things thereof and of course we could also bring up maybe any of the other well any of the news

00:58:49.220 items that are around uh those fines that people are having to pay uh and and supposedly they're

00:58:55.140 not going to get their their driver's license back if they don't pay their fine i don't really

00:58:59.380 understand how that works but while we're while we're waiting for uh jordan's title of uh stop

00:59:04.260 the spray to come on he'll be on in a minute or two he was sent his link and uh he did promise

00:59:09.300 for 10 a.m. so we're hopeful we're hopeful but i think in the erstwhile we need to think

00:59:15.920 just loud and clear here for a moment out loud and clear that it it really doesn't make sense

00:59:24.000 that you can prevent people from exercising their basic liberties due to covid laws which of course

00:59:30.120 aren't laws they were written into regulations and health health care mandates by unelected

00:59:36.780 bureaucrats uh i guess with the permission of their minister perhaps their deputy minister but

00:59:41.500 nonetheless it's it's it's hard to understand actually how how anyone could think to themselves

00:59:47.020 yeah you know you not wearing a mask uh means that not only should i fine you but now i need

00:59:53.740 to garnish your wages i i don't know what to say to that i don't know what they i don't know how

01:00:01.340 to respond to that it i i can't i can't even articulate an argument what's that line from i

01:00:07.880 don't know is that from is that from like happy gilmore or something it's not happy gilmore it 0.98

01:00:11.280 feels like an adam sadler movie or something you know what you've just said is so stupid it has 0.96

01:00:16.940 lowered the iq of everybody in the room you know i reject your hypothesis i think i think that you 1.00

01:00:23.220 are an abomination and may god have mercy on your soul like i mean i don't know whatever happened to

01:00:28.520 the shaming that that needs to happen of leadership i don't know why none of our leaders seem to have 0.96

01:00:33.940 grumpy uncles or grand grandpas who could tell them how it is and kind of maybe chastise them

01:00:40.200 a bit and give them a bit of a something slap you know um we won't say that word here on on on tv but

01:00:47.060 the point is that what where is the conviction like where where did where did people fall off

01:00:55.160 the wagon when it came to a basic sense of conscience and it's like no you don't actually

01:00:59.780 get to fine people for not wearing a mask and even if you do you don't get to withhold their wages

01:01:05.700 from them i'm sorry like you don't you don't this is nonsense you can't take away their driver's

01:01:12.120 licenses and you can't take away their wages this is slavery it's a mask it's a mask like

01:01:19.580 they say well then just wear it no you just wear it you you back off i don't understand why i'm

01:01:26.380 having to articulate an argument where i'm supposed to be the subservient one i'm the

01:01:30.580 citizen i'm a free-born citizen in a democracy you're the public servant not me get out of my

01:01:36.880 way i don't don't really understand how this is even an argument but it is it is there are people

01:01:43.600 who are being fined and if you don't pay your fine you could have your services suspended

01:01:49.900 things that you have a right to i just don't understand it at all well right on time we have

01:01:55.300 james title he is going to be on with us to tell us about stop the spray bc he's been on with us

01:02:00.700 before and he's going to tell us a little bit more about a recent report that came out that spraying

01:02:06.040 after logging is really bad for all of us and for the forest and actually it's super toxic so james

01:02:11.860 welcome to the show hey thanks for having me nathan uh hopefully the reception here is a

01:02:16.480 little better than last week or the other week for sure it's good to have you it's good to have

01:02:22.280 you why don't you walk us through what this report was saying what what we need to understand about

01:02:27.900 it sure so the report builds on uh some previous research that was conducted out of umbc here in

01:02:33.940 prince george by lisa wood uh that was published actually over a year ago uh the first part of the

01:02:40.440 report that basically said that the glyphosate it goes into the roots of

01:02:45.720 these herbaceous pardial plants like blueberries and raspberries and pretty

01:02:49.680 much everything else that isn't killed by the glyphosate spray and the next year

01:02:55.620 that glyphosate will flush back out into the foliage and the berries that you

01:03:02.340 will be consuming when you eat them and so they found that out that was that

01:03:07.080 published but the new part that just came out was how long this stuff is persisting for and I think

01:03:14.280 also a little bit more detail on the levels so a year after spraying blueberries and raspberries

01:03:23.160 have been found about a quarter of them that they sampled had glyphosate levels that were higher

01:03:27.640 than the default limit allowed in grocery stores so these are berries you know you're out in the

01:03:32.440 bush picking blueberries and they wouldn't even be allowed to be sold on the grocery store shelves

01:03:39.800 and i think that's that's just shocking and i think it really opened the eyes of a lot of people

01:03:44.680 who may have not taken the spray issue that seriously because let's be honest for

01:03:50.120 for decades we've been told that the glyphosate persists for just uh you know at the most maybe

01:03:55.400 a couple months and the signs that they post at these places where they spray all they say is uh

01:04:01.400 avoid the pluck block for two days you know so and i've i've been in these places and i've picked

01:04:08.440 berries i've eaten berries from these blocks you know the year after spring so i'm like oh yeah i

01:04:13.480 believe the science i believe what the sign said actually and i've always kind of looked at this

01:04:18.040 more of well they're killing food for wildlife i didn't really think that it was a contamination

01:04:23.800 issue uh you know having said that i've always noticed that the aspen trees years after spraying

01:04:31.720 look like they're still impacted so i always suspected there was something going on with

01:04:37.400 with uh long-term impacts on the health of a lot of these these species and i think one of the

01:04:44.200 interesting things was the fireweed you know fireweed roots can actually be pretty old i didn't

01:04:50.200 i didn't quite know that um and they had the longest levels of glyphosate residue so 12 years

01:04:55.880 after spraying the fireweed still had glyphosate in them 12 years so it's yeah that's no that's that's

01:05:08.040 why why are we doing this this is a terrible idea oh man just uh inertia momentum ego

01:05:21.720 pride you know i'd probably say like not to nothing to do with with rationality or logic

01:05:28.200 i can guarantee you that i mean they just like we talked about the last show and i don't know

01:05:33.800 i don't want to get into all this stuff again but or maybe we do you know they just um they've got

01:05:40.680 a simplified view of the forest and it's just like a farm and and you got to get rid of the

01:05:45.080 competition and that's still the guiding principle and actually since we talked last

01:05:49.400 there's been some interesting uh things i've discovered as far as what the industry believes

01:05:54.040 and you know we've got the top so the top forester for a major company here in essential interior

01:05:59.960 kind of saying the exact same thing we're saying so we can talk about that later if you want or

01:06:05.400 no i i'm happy to bring that up now i'm happy to happy to wander around these questions a little

01:06:11.600 bit here there and everywhere one thing that actually just comes to mind here james i mean

01:06:15.680 my parents got a farm out uh out west here towards nest lake uh it's actually on heron lake which is

01:06:21.700 that little heart shaped thing right underneath the lung shapes of of nest lake but the point is

01:06:26.540 uh they they have this spot there and i think of like what how the the the wild like our own

01:06:32.540 wildlife that is to say the domesticated animals the the pigs and especially when they clear out

01:06:37.100 the underbrush and that sort of thing like i mean all they're doing is leaving behind fertilizer

01:06:41.260 they're not toxifying it why didn't why didn't people just put the animals on it to clean up

01:06:47.420 afterwards if you wanted to give the saplings a fresh start or whatever like what's wrong with

01:06:51.500 that wouldn't that just put the organic material back into the forest well then there there was a

01:06:56.620 huge industry back in the 90s because a lot of this glyphosate spraying stuff i mean none of this is

01:07:01.180 new like the controversy about it i think we're learning more about it now but back in the 90s

01:07:05.740 there was a fair bit of opposition to uh spraying around prince george and the ndp government of the

01:07:12.300 day i think they made an effort to kind of reduce chemical use and and use sheep so there was a huge

01:07:19.260 industry of sheep grazing these cup blocks uh to kind of clear out some of the herbaceous

01:07:25.500 vegetation without you know contaminating it or poisoning it and then i like you say fertilizing

01:07:30.940 it and and it was a great method you know i think we had 30 000 sheep in uh bc i think between the

01:07:39.100 peace and the prince george area uh dedicated to this program and and they they were doing huge

01:07:44.860 areas uh and i i know i know a couple of the grazers that are still trying to get it back on

01:07:51.820 its legs one of them is dennis loxton and he actually had some contracts out in alberta last

01:07:58.060 year so hopefully he can pick it up again he's here in prince george so they had this huge

01:08:03.020 industry and then around the early 2000s it just got shut down and all sorts of terrible things

01:08:09.100 happened in the early 2000s to forestry in this province and I think it was a

01:08:14.200 lot of it had to do with this kind of knee-jerk reaction to the pine beetle

01:08:17.200 and a lot of regulations were eliminated makes you a lot of this you know I don't

01:08:22.180 know if you want to talk about Kevin Falcon at all on the show here but he's

01:08:24.480 running for a leader of the BC Liberals and you know he ran this deregulation

01:08:31.720 ministry back in 2002 2003 and you know there's no minutes of a lot of these

01:08:38.140 meetings where they talked about getting rid of the regulations so we don't know what actually

01:08:43.820 you know who's responsible for what but let's just say a whole bunch of regulations were

01:08:48.460 eliminated in the early 2000s that just destroyed our forests and the forest industry

01:08:53.340 right the appurtency was gotten rid of the requirement to cut local logs at local mills

01:08:57.900 that went through the window and then all of a sudden you had these big super mills a lot of

01:09:02.140 the smaller family mills you know their days were numbered we're still seeing them die off

01:09:05.980 and they made uh they basically made it way easier to herbicide spray right so there was there used

01:09:12.700 to be a requirement that uh you had to get a registered professional biologist to sign off

01:09:17.300 on spray plants and there were some more restrictions around spraying um wet areas and

01:09:23.020 uh a lot of this is kind of documented in this uh the frog watch director pernima givindarish

01:09:29.320 Wu's report back in 2008 talking about the impact to amphibians from forestry spraying and you know

01:09:38.340 they all of these easements and cutting of red tape and restrictions just made it easier and

01:09:45.560 more sense for everybody just to spray with helicopters so the sheep industry just died

01:09:50.380 like all these guys went bankrupt you know she whole herds of sheep had to be liquidated like

01:09:59.120 the amount of sheep grazing went from thousands of hectares a year to like nothing and yeah i mean

01:10:07.320 that's our own fault it's the government's fault that you allowed this to happen there was no

01:10:11.500 when you when you do these kind of programs you got to provide these these people with um

01:10:16.960 you know security and knowledge that they're going to have work for 10 years like you can't

01:10:21.960 just build up and then liquidate a whole herds of sheep for this purpose right you gotta you gotta

01:10:27.440 you got to provide some certainty in that and the government never ensured that happened and all the

01:10:32.080 companies just did the cheapest thing so we all went back to glyphosate sprain throughout the

01:10:38.160 2000s and we're slowly seeing that those ideas come back again um i mean i really want to see

01:10:45.520 that happen north of town so can4 is going to be spraying a whole bunch again this year northeast

01:10:51.600 to town and uh thereafter the herbaceous uh threat you know the fireweed all of these this huge rich

01:11:01.360 complex of herbaceous plants a lot of like rubis you know raspberry and thimbleberry species and

01:11:06.700 ferns and twinberry elderberry a whole bunch of really cool important plants are just going to

01:11:12.740 wipe out with glyphosate and that's where these sheep should be going and i've talked to can for

01:11:18.180 I'm like, listen, you guys need to, you guys made half a billion dollars in profit this first quarter.

01:11:24.020 I think it's time to like spend a little bit of money on not spraying and doing something different.

01:11:30.500 So that's, that's what I'd like to see happen.

01:11:32.460 And I've, I've talked to him about it and apparently they're going to do a couple little trial, you know, sheep grazing things this year, but it's not enough.

01:11:38.880 They, they got to stop spraying completely and forestry.

01:11:43.620 And like you say, there's, there's alternatives.

01:11:45.540 it's kind of incredible how those alternatives work too like i mean it's you know i was raised

01:11:52.320 not quite a city boy my whole life we went hiking we went we were uh we were an outdoor family and

01:11:57.780 i was raised in the suburbs of prince george i know it's hard for our some of our viewers who

01:12:01.240 are out outside of prince george to believe there are suburbs of prince george but there are

01:12:05.320 uh it's a quite a spread out city not as spread out as lake lahash or chilliwack but it's a pretty

01:12:09.960 spread out city it's a large geographic area but the point is that that i was raised out of doors

01:12:15.120 for sure but but once we got on the land uh which was right after i graduated from university i

01:12:19.880 really started to understand that like i knew nothing about that that interrelationality between

01:12:25.400 wildlife domestic animals and the forest and and the land in general right and then your own effort

01:12:31.440 that has to be put into it it's all it's all over the place it's a lot it's very complicated

01:12:35.520 and and it's been this beautiful thing to watch my dad do some kind of heritage both heritage

01:12:40.920 animals and then heritage methods the old homesteading methods around clearing land

01:12:45.640 putting animals on it first and then they take out the foliage and then that makes it easier to log

01:12:50.600 if you were to hand log or select log that was how it was done in in the old days and i don't know

01:12:56.440 why i don't know why we had to get away from that entirely it it definitely works and especially

01:13:02.120 with this question of reforestation and and making sure that we don't spray and toxify the place

01:13:07.960 like with mobile fencing nowadays too with what you can do with with electric fencing like you're

01:13:12.840 not gonna have sheep just wandering around like you can keep them in very concentrated areas and

01:13:16.680 they can mow down anything uh very quickly yeah well i don't know if fencing out on those cup

01:13:23.080 blocks would make uh would be a lot of work but um you know they've got sheep herding dogs that

01:13:28.520 can keep them in place and and yeah they would and you can create little um enclosures for them

01:13:33.560 at night for sure yeah and it would be easy to to rig those electric fences up um yeah i know it's

01:13:42.040 it's very uh it's very interesting all of those things that you just talked about and

01:13:46.760 and uh you know close to close to nature forestry and and allowing animals and uh to work with us

01:13:53.800 and and help us out and and you know and part of that to go back to the whole reforestation thing

01:13:58.760 And I think the other part of that is, okay, sure.

01:14:01.680 It might cost a little bit more money to do something that way.

01:14:04.520 It might be a little bit more effort.

01:14:05.760 You might have to even hire more people, God forbid.

01:14:08.760 God forbid.

01:14:10.000 Yeah.

01:14:11.160 But we could allow more diversity in the forests

01:14:16.800 as well.

01:14:17.360 And I think that's the other that's the other big thing

01:14:19.200 that I think it's forgotten in these discussions and especially at a higher level

01:14:22.880 in the government, all they're thinking about is is saving money and

01:14:25.920 and keeping keeping the forestry workforce down ironically you know you'd think the government

01:14:31.420 wouldn't be for that but if you look at their policies that's the effect of what they believe

01:14:36.000 in is to is to cut down on employment and reduce the number of people that can get livelihoods out

01:14:42.480 of our forests believe it or not that's that's the end result of you know a lot of these work

01:14:47.160 safe requirements of uh getting people uh into machines for instance you know the the hand

01:14:53.820 followers and the buckers the government doesn't like that work safe doesn't like that you know

01:14:57.420 they want to get them into enclosed uh enclosed cabs on machines and then of course uh the

01:15:04.940 productivity is exponentially more it's going to be way less jobs by having everybody in machines

01:15:10.140 right because there's there's just too much efficiency in that but um but part of the

01:15:17.820 the government's uh role here i think is is to take a step back and say okay it might cost a

01:15:24.620 little bit more money to use these kind of other methods but um why don't we just allow more

01:15:30.840 deciduous why don't we just uh you know this totalitarian mindset that we're applying to 0.59

01:15:37.480 our forests where everything has to like 95 percent of these every single cup block in our

01:15:42.820 area has to be conifer dominated like they just need to lay off that idea it's it's it's the

01:15:49.860 that's an idea of like two centuries ago that we developed in germany to to simplify um revenues

01:15:56.500 for the king you know nothing's changed since that time as far as as how we figure out um of how we

01:16:03.460 think about reforestation in this province and just i alluded to earlier there about uh some of

01:16:09.220 of the big corporations are starting to think differently and there's a really

01:16:13.660 cool video that we posted on the Stop the Spray BC page there I don't know if you saw that Jeff

01:16:18.160 Mycock he is the chief forester of West Fraser and British Columbia operations I think he's

01:16:24.980 based out of either Quennell or Williams Lake and I think he's an interior kid like I think

01:16:31.600 he's from here because he says stuff that makes way too much sense for him to be from Vancouver you

01:16:37.920 know and so basically he did this presentation with the canadian institute of forestry

01:16:43.660 it's on youtube and it kind of languished there and somebody brought it to my attention

01:16:48.540 and he just destroys the whole premise of modern reforestation like we're basically making fire

01:16:57.100 traps that's what we're doing that's what he admitted he's like the the whole if you look

01:17:01.980 at our forests like we don't have the diversity out there to deal with a changing climate you know

01:17:06.580 whatever that's going to look like uh he's saying that we're basically making fire prone forests

01:17:12.740 and he doesn't it's not super direct about the deciduous connection but he's like

01:17:17.620 he hints at it pretty blatantly so he says you know uh we got to look at the trees that

01:17:23.220 we're suppressing okay what are we suppressing the the aspen and the birch and the cottonwoods

01:17:28.260 and then he talks about uh and he uses it as a question at the very end that's the very last

01:17:33.220 point in his presentation maybe we need more deciduous he says you know and and he kind of

01:17:39.300 couches that in some disclaimers saying that uh that's not really uh he's not saying that's

01:17:44.580 exactly what needs to be done just a question but i think the message is obvious so when you

01:17:48.660 when you tie that in with the rest of his presentation our forests are just we're setting

01:17:53.460 them up for failure the way we're doing these plantations of just spruce and pine trees it's

01:17:59.780 just obvious to everybody that lives in our area like just drive out there in the bush and see

01:18:03.700 what we're doing it's it's madness so yeah that's the other part of it is like we could

01:18:10.900 allow more diversity get rid of the glyphosate do things like sheep manual brushing

01:18:17.380 uh there would be there'd be more work involved anyway but uh with the same of budget right so

01:18:23.140 say they only want to spend um 10 million a year on on silviculture you're gonna get way more jobs

01:18:29.700 if you use that 10 million dollars on sheep and and brushing as opposed to hiring a hell

01:18:34.660 an expensive helicopter from the lower mainland to come up and spray everything and you're

01:18:41.220 supporting chemical companies in china and yeah mostly chinese offshore glyphosate manufacturers

01:18:48.340 with our tax dollars that doesn't make a lot of sense does it no

01:18:54.740 Andrew, they won't listen to it.

01:18:58.400 Sorry, go ahead.

01:19:00.000 Just kind of steering it then to this question of, well, the direction of the province then.

01:19:05.140 So you'd mentioned that, of course, Kevin Falcon has put in his name for the Liberal leadership.

01:19:10.260 We've spoken on this show many times with Ellis Ross.

01:19:13.500 That's kind of the person we've been talking to the most.

01:19:16.340 I'm sure at some point we'll bring on Mr. Falcon.

01:19:19.220 But, I mean, you've got center stage now and you're up first.

01:19:22.760 What do you have to say about the policies thereof and the direction you think he would try and take the province if he became premier?

01:19:30.780 I think he'd be a terrible mistake.

01:19:32.720 I have no idea why this guy is getting the airplay that he's getting.

01:19:36.320 I don't I think the B.C. liberals will make a huge mistake to elect him as leader.

01:19:40.360 I think Ellis Ross would be a way better leader, especially for the north.

01:19:44.560 I mean, just look at the forestry stuff that Kevin Falcon did.

01:19:46.880 he you know if we can pin those things on him i mean he was minister of state for deregulation

01:19:51.920 when they got rid of appurtency right so he he led to the all those policy movements led to the

01:19:57.800 direct closure and and destruction of our forest ministry and prince george let's be honest like

01:20:04.500 that's that's insanity to think this guy would stand up for our interests uh he went after he

01:20:10.980 quit politics he worked for anthem capital you know and and and worked on getting all this foreign

01:20:18.080 capital pumping into our real estate uh sector and that was his big accomplishment after politics

01:20:25.780 and we look at this guy as somebody to respect like or look as a leader like come on it's not

01:20:33.520 a leader uh look what he did when he was minister of transportation okay all he focused on was

01:20:38.980 getting port expansion. Port expansion is nothing but a handout to offshore

01:20:43.960 manufacturers. Anytime a port is expanded it makes imports cheaper and

01:20:50.220 undercuts the local producers in our country and that was his priority right

01:20:55.800 and then the other as far as exporting stuff it's all dedicated to

01:20:59.200 exporting unrefined raw resources coal and those kinds of things. So I mean

01:21:04.840 those policies were I mean for me politically I want to see a leader who wants to build our economy

01:21:11.040 on things that we build self-sustainability manufacturing here in Canada those are the

01:21:18.140 values that I look for and those are the things I want to see a leader kind of prioritize Kevin

01:21:21.960 Falcon didn't do that right he's all about handing our country over to offshore global capital

01:21:29.980 interests that's what he's about and that's what he clearly pursued when he was um you know working

01:21:36.620 for these big global capital guys dumping money into our real estate well i could go on and on

01:21:42.140 i know a fair bit about kevin falcon because back in the 2000s i was um uh i don't know if i mentioned

01:21:47.820 this before but i was a researcher in the legislature for the ndp when they were in opposition

01:21:53.020 and you know we would look at we our job was to criticize the bc liberals of the day

01:21:58.540 i'm not an nd anymore right so i consider myself non-partisan i can i can dish out on both parties

01:22:04.860 equally and and maybe for fairness sake we should we should kind of pivot to the fact that uh that

01:22:12.060 john horgan uh has not has not been the green guy that he marketed himself as our current premier

01:22:18.780 has uh has actually increased uh subsidies to fossil fuels at least if stewart parker

01:22:23.340 uh is being accurate there i assume he is he knows his stuff and then if we have uh we talk

01:22:29.100 about the old growth force and that sort of thing i think there's signs going up now about

01:22:33.020 how old growth should be protected so clearly john horgan isn't exactly mr green new deal

01:22:39.100 well this will be the challenge for the bc liberals is that basically the ndp has taken their

01:22:43.580 their position politically right i mean the ndp is the new bc liberals there's i don't see any

01:22:49.420 difference nope no argument here i mean maybe maybe i'd say the only differences are probably

01:22:54.780 friendlier to the unions the big unions that got them into power and donated the money that's

01:22:58.620 probably you know the only reliable thing about the ndp is that is that they'll always they'll

01:23:04.140 always make sure that their union buddies come out on top and i think that's why you know site c

01:23:09.100 happened which is a terrible mistake um you know probably also why the old girl stuff is because

01:23:15.900 they want to keep their union the small number the dwindling number of employees that are still in

01:23:20.620 those forestry unions to keep them employed right and cut down the last of the old growth so that

01:23:26.220 nobody has any work and that environmental tourism suffers and all this stuff so yeah i mean that

01:23:32.620 that'll be the challenge for any of the leaders who take over the bc liberals is that uh horrigan

01:23:38.460 has basically pulled the rug out from under them as far as their bread and butter right i mean they

01:23:43.500 want to hand out to do these big corporate handouts will john horgan beat them to the punch

01:23:49.580 smart i mean i mean they just take your opposition stuff right and run with it

01:23:53.660 it's just uh brilliant yeah this is why this is why it's so i get so depressed by politics

01:23:58.380 because it's it's so easy for it's so easy to play that game like i don't know just the way

01:24:05.180 our society is is that if you just give everything to like maximum exploitation and if the more

01:24:14.860 irresponsible you are with the environment the more popular you are in society like i i will

01:24:20.060 never understand what's what's wrong with us like why we think like that but that's the sad reality

01:24:25.580 and and i refuse to accept that that uh that has to that's the way it has to be i i still think

01:24:31.340 that we can be humanity can show self-restraint and i think we can we can do politics differently

01:24:38.780 with respect to our environment and and not have to destroy it to do things that benefit everybody

01:24:43.420 and then i would argue that that this low value um raw commodity export model that all this stuff is

01:24:51.900 based on isn't in our interest okay it isn't to our benefit you know we're just we're just shipping

01:24:59.260 all this stuff away like there's no jobs in any of this like 600 i don't know i just saw a statistic

01:25:04.620 on facebook so i don't know how accurate it is but you see those big ships 600 loads of logging

01:25:09.960 trucks are shipped out every day on these ships and i don't know that doesn't sound unreasonable

01:25:15.380 like those are huge ships full of logs and this is and we're shutting mills down you know so that's

01:25:22.080 and if you do policy like that like that's what people want i don't i don't get it nathan it's

01:25:29.120 i don't know what the disconnect is or how how we've come to this juncture but

01:25:34.240 i mean we're just going to take everything till it's all gone i think and all these all these

01:25:39.660 leading politicians who get the most play like kevin falcon he just wants more of it right that's

01:25:45.180 what he stands for he wants to cut the taxes for the richest people the one percent he wants to

01:25:50.140 probably cut more regulations like that's that's his whole bread and butter that's what that's uh

01:25:54.700 what he thinks will get him elected and he's probably right it's it's really sad but that's

01:25:59.460 why i'm on this on your show and that's why i i get to say things like that because you know you

01:26:05.420 need somebody to to point all this stuff out and i i i really enjoy it and i mean it's one of the

01:26:11.440 reasons why we bring on uh darcy repin from the bc rule party and of course we bring on stewart

01:26:16.240 parker um i myself of course uh call myself a conservative i'm a tory through and through

01:26:22.220 how closely aligned that is federally

01:26:24.860 anymore is a different question

01:26:26.860 but it's funny because

01:26:28.760 my show is dominated with people

01:26:30.560 who don't necessarily come on

01:26:32.580 the same side as I do

01:26:33.800 but that's not the point, right? The point is to have a real

01:26:36.560 conversation and these are real issues

01:26:38.460 in British Columbia and I mean

01:26:40.320 maybe we can even talk to that for a second. I mean

01:26:42.240 Darcy unfortunately is headed up to the Northwest Territory

01:26:44.480 soon so he can't come and talk to us

01:26:46.420 about the redistricting but I mean as if

01:26:48.400 as if it wasn't

01:26:50.360 bad enough for us in northern bc now they're talking about taking some of our seats away

01:26:54.580 and now what what voice are we going to have to voice some of these opinions even if you did get

01:26:59.920 elected tomorrow i mean you're now you're one of two mlas instead of five like where where is

01:27:06.020 well nathan i i think you know we've we've got to we've got to start the rebellion of the north

01:27:13.600 i think is what needs to happen you know well uh you you can set your checkpoint up out there in

01:27:18.440 beaverly you know we're north of town and we'll start the republic of prince george i think that's

01:27:23.160 all there is to it you know we'll uh i'd propose we put an aspen tree on the flag though

01:27:30.580 i'm an aspen tree i do like aspen trees i i think i think the thing is that i mean the best name for

01:27:38.800 us was already stolen by those silly little islands in the south pacific not to the pacific

01:27:42.760 islanders we love you but the the name was taken a new caledonia was taken so we didn't get to be

01:27:48.180 um that's what we were supposed to be called uh but instead we became british columbia i do it's

01:27:55.220 funny like lately you know i i kind of think we should have stuck with that name you know that

01:28:00.920 first nations well it's lately 10a but i don't know lately is kind of a nice simple version i

01:28:06.380 don't know that's that's kind of a pretty name yeah it is it is i think i think that it's again

01:28:11.240 my my thought on this has evolved over time if i can wax philosophical for a second i used to

01:28:16.100 probably have a much more kind of pro-colonial stance on those questions or trying to pivot back

01:28:22.040 to an old understanding of the kind of the colonial relationship between First Nations

01:28:27.760 and non-Indigenous people, despite being a First Nations person myself. But I've now come around

01:28:33.720 to the idea that the fact of the matter is, if Western sovereignty is going to happen at all,

01:28:37.300 let alone individual sovereignty or Northern British Columbian assertion of its rights,

01:28:41.840 It has to be based in a narrative that the First Nations can agree with and support and feel partnered with.

01:28:48.920 So I figure that actually maybe we won't get to have, you know, every little kind of, I don't know, at one point I used the diocesan map of the Catholic Church to redivide Canada because it made a lot more sense and it isolated all the metropolitan areas.

01:29:01.180 but nonetheless if i if i have to re you know have to rename every area after the the tribal

01:29:06.760 name for it like i'll swing with that as long as it means as i get more autonomy here at home

01:29:11.180 because what seems to be going on is that everybody in victoria edmonton winnipeg and

01:29:15.020 and ottawa they don't care about us and and that needs to stop oh absolutely well a good example

01:29:21.100 is this 10-year contamination of the forest with this glyphosate i uh you know i wrote a pretty

01:29:26.800 decent press release i thought and i mean this is a story as far as i'm concerned i i shopped it

01:29:31.760 around all the major media guys down in in vancouver i didn't get a single bite um i got the

01:29:39.760 rocky mountain goat which is out of valmont they'll be doing a story but actually the scoop on that

01:29:44.960 was peter you were here in town with stand up for the north committee and the pg daily news so good

01:29:49.040 on them they they published that and peter said that uh i don't have the numbers in front of you

01:29:55.280 i think it got 60 over 60 000 shares from their website and he said that's one of the popular

01:30:01.440 stories that uh that they've had in a while so it's not that it's an unpopular story it's that uh

01:30:08.320 it's that the big media guys down in the lower mainland don't care about us okay so if 99 of

01:30:14.080 the sprain that's happens in central interior is in prince george doesn't affect them who cares

01:30:19.760 right and also they don't really want to be confronted with the side effect of their domination

01:30:26.380 of us economically right i mean if you if you i know stewart likes to talk about these these

01:30:32.340 theories and and i'm sure you do too are you familiar with like the hinterland metropolitan

01:30:37.560 thesis yeah i call us that all the time i hate i hate that we're just the hinterland to them is

01:30:43.600 terrible terrible terrible idea but you know innis that that was a harold innis's uh theory from

01:30:49.260 about the development of canada you know from the fur trade to the railroads and

01:30:53.500 and basically the the vast north is always kind of a subset of whatever metropolitan area

01:31:01.860 is connected to it and i think it's a great explanation for what what happens up here

01:31:07.300 um you know like can for their head offices that's not in prince george it's in vancouver

01:31:13.680 right all their big big wigs down there you can email them they might not write back to you they

01:31:19.240 don't care about us right I mean how do you get through to these guys they have

01:31:23.380 some lackeys up here that do what they're told and have no authority and

01:31:28.000 they probably feel terrible about themselves but they've got no choice

01:31:32.380 right maybe they can't get through to Vancouver and besides that we're just

01:31:37.720 one little small part of Canfor's empire they've got you know a far-flung business

01:31:44.560 model, you know, from Sweden to the southern US to northern BC. So, yeah, I think it just really

01:31:52.160 explains a lot of what's happening. And we got to, you know, Prince George, we have to start being

01:31:56.940 more of the metropolis. And I think we kind of were at one point, you know, with all the mill

01:32:00.620 jobs we used to have and all the mill owners were in Prince George. That's why we had the most

01:32:05.080 millionaires per capita in Canada at one point was because we owned our local resources. And the

01:32:09.900 production of those resources was was located in our town and then as those things got bought out

01:32:15.920 all of that ownership went elsewhere so if it went one direction you know it can theoretically

01:32:21.680 you can go back the other way nathan so we we got to make it happen somehow buddy i don't know how

01:32:25.880 i think um i think uh we need to stop looking at the bc liberals and the ndp and i think we need to

01:32:32.140 work on our own political our own political establishment up here i think that's why

01:32:37.660 Darcy's ideas are so good with the rule the rule party of BC is I think he brings those issues in

01:32:43.740 and I don't I don't really know how that's gonna how we can make that effective but uh

01:32:50.300 but maybe we can who knows well I mean and uh Stuart has looped all of us uh in on on something

01:32:57.980 including Aaron Ackman we'll have him on the show tomorrow morning as well and then then Stuart on

01:33:02.380 uh in the second half I'm not sure if Aaron and Stuart will be on at the exact same time they're

01:33:05.820 both busy but uh but but stewards definitely looped us all in on this question of trying to

01:33:10.780 organize around this especially when it comes to the redistricting of the boundaries is that kind

01:33:14.800 of being the touch the touchstone and and the moment to kind of do to come together as a

01:33:20.240 coalition because whatever else our values might be the fact of the matter is nobody thinks it's

01:33:24.560 okay to have our voices eliminated from the legislature especially when there's more than

01:33:29.100 enough seats going into the lower mainland they're going to increase it by six that's that's enough

01:33:34.100 if they if that keeps happening every couple of years that's fine but they shouldn't eliminate

01:33:38.300 voices from the north it's complete nonsense well i also think that there's we probably

01:33:43.980 agree in a lot more than i don't know than twitter or you know a lot of people really

01:33:53.040 like to focus in on division right and they they like to divide people and i'm not i don't really

01:33:58.860 identify with um the conservative party but i definitely identify with certain values that

01:34:03.560 they claim to have you know as far as being a free market believers of the free market and

01:34:10.520 competition and you know having those kind of things in our economy i absolutely 100% believe

01:34:17.340 that but i don't really think that the bc liberals or the conservatives actually believe that

01:34:20.840 okay if you're if you're going to be captured by the biggest corporations that don't stand up for

01:34:27.020 the free market that are the exact opposite of the free market then you're not a true conservative

01:34:32.480 of in my books but i think we need to find those those kind of unifying ideas and and come together

01:34:38.440 on those you know and and we we all believe in a community and being nice to each other and you

01:34:44.720 know let's just not be uh let's not be dicks to each other i think that's a fairly simple principle

01:34:49.960 that we can all agree on and let's come together as a people and and move forward and all these

01:34:56.680 labels and stuff i find i find that they divide people and i think the real the real metric is do

01:35:01.860 they look out for the interests of our community or are they looking out for the interests of these

01:35:06.020 massive corporations that have nothing to do with our community and you don't have to be a lefty

01:35:12.940 or conservative or whatever to to be on the right side of that question no i i completely agree i

01:35:19.560 completely agree maybe something we can kind of pivot to then james is to talk a little bit about

01:35:24.320 what would that more nationalized economy look like or certainly a more localized economy

01:35:29.760 i believe you know there used to be all these mills around prince george before the amalgamation

01:35:36.380 that happened in the 60s and ever since then it's only ever gotten tighter and tighter and tighter

01:35:40.900 um i i don't know if we're is are we talking about going all the way back to like two-man

01:35:47.520 sawmills everywhere or are we talking about trying to do more of a co-op sort of model when it comes

01:35:53.020 the local sawmills what would what would a localized nationalized pro pro worker pro family

01:36:00.060 forestry economy look like when it comes to those things yeah i i think about i think about this

01:36:05.100 stuff a lot because that's my i build like i'm really at the the bottom tier of this of this

01:36:10.940 kind of economy i do you know for the last 10 years i've run a woodworking shop and i go to

01:36:15.340 craft fairs you know and bring my wares it's almost like medieval type era stuff where you

01:36:20.860 load up all your stuff and then haul it to the the crafter in a wagon and and do your

01:36:25.180 week cup you know you do a week-long sale there i did that at the convention center in vancouver

01:36:29.500 at the circle craft and i went all the way to toronto one year there selling my stuff and

01:36:35.580 and you know i make knives i do some steel work i do cutting boards i do furniture and a lot of

01:36:41.580 that wood i use is is sourced um entirely locally right so i try to like integrate the whole you

01:36:48.620 know vertically integrate the uh the corporate model style of woodworking but uh no it's just

01:36:53.660 you know i've yeah me and a sawmill and a couple of logs and mill that up and and dry it out and

01:36:59.500 the steel you know i get in sheets from somewhere in europe they won't tell me where of knife steel

01:37:04.540 and uh i cheat right i use modern technology so uh water jet cut out the knife profiles and

01:37:10.860 and uh and so i think there's like there's ways to really increase our local manufacturing of

01:37:16.780 everything using new technologies uh why are all of our tools made and made offshore you know you

01:37:22.700 go in a canadian tire like what's made in canada anymore what's made in america like nothing and

01:37:28.540 what we were so useless that we can't build our own tools like this should be one of the the most

01:37:33.980 basic things that a society should be able to do is produce its own tooling right because if we

01:37:38.220 can't produce our own tooling then we then we're screwed for everything else right we can't uh we

01:37:43.180 can't develop industrial infrastructure if we don't have the the means to make all that stuff

01:37:47.500 so we got to start at a very small level and and build up i mean i buy aluminum for stuff when i

01:37:54.940 when i build aluminum why is our aluminum made offshore like how come i never see a made in

01:37:59.900 canada uh square tube aluminum product that aluminum probably comes from kitamap right so we

01:38:07.660 we refine it and and make the ore or take the ore and make a raw ingot aluminum and kitamat

01:38:13.340 then we send that somewhere else and then we buy it back steel how come we don't have a steel

01:38:19.340 manufacturer in british columbia we don't even make our own steel like we've got we've got a

01:38:26.620 lot of power that we could use we can we could do non-coal steel manufacturing you know with

01:38:32.380 electric furnaces and stuff a lot of other countries little countries do that like why

01:38:36.780 why don't we do that why are we importing steel and then it gets to the point where if you have

01:38:41.580 a shortage it's we don't even we can't even get it because we're you know low man on on the uh if

01:38:48.040 if there is a shortage somewhere do you think we're going to get prioritized for that steel

01:38:51.420 shipment that's going to be somewhere else so these are the kinds of things that we need to

01:38:55.820 we need to develop and i i don't know what let's have a small steel mill in prince george how

01:38:59.840 how hard is that uh and if there's cheaper steel from somewhere else and we need to put

01:39:06.180 taxes on those imports why are we bending over backwards to make it easier for these imports to

01:39:12.120 come in off the boats at the ports you know why why is kevin falcon allowed to brag about that

01:39:17.740 was his greatest accomplishment was to make all these imports cheaper like buddy you're screwing

01:39:22.420 over canada that's what you did that's what he did by supporting that so i did like we need a

01:39:29.720 total paradigm shift in how we look at um policies and and transportation and shipping and and ports

01:39:36.560 and and tariffs and all that stuff so i'm a big degree obviously i've got i think all this stuff

01:39:43.060 is possible i'm an optimist in that sense you know i'm pessimistic about some things but

01:39:47.040 i think the entrepreneurial uh power of of the population of the average person is enormous

01:39:53.620 you know and like we always think that we need that we need these big corporations to solve our

01:39:58.000 problems like that's ridiculous they don't solve our problems folks like they they make the problems

01:40:02.960 they they steal our resources and they and they hoard all the wealth to themselves like jimmy 0.86

01:40:07.680 pattison is how many billions of dollars are richer as a result of this pandemic and you see

01:40:13.760 the big media in vancouver like keith baldree loves jimmy pattison you know you see him on twitter he

01:40:19.520 he basically worships the guy that's a whole other question about the independence of the media down

01:40:25.440 there um but uh we have to look at things differently we have to put trust and faith

01:40:32.120 in the average person to to solve problems and to develop a new economy one of the things that

01:40:40.140 occurred to me some time ago i for a time i was interested in in getting a well for a time they

01:40:47.120 were called p14 they were of course based off the enfield action but they were a beefed up version

01:40:52.580 overcompensating even compared to the

01:40:54.620 Mauser. They were built for the First World War.

01:40:56.780 They were handed out in both wars, but

01:40:58.440 not enough of them were made in order to see

01:41:00.420 really front-line action. They were used as sniper

01:41:02.460 rifles and home guard weapons.

01:41:05.500 But they're these

01:41:06.520 beefed up. They were in .303, of course,

01:41:08.660 .303 British, but they're these beautiful

01:41:10.640 looking guns, the beautiful

01:41:12.420 looking rifles. I always thought if we could

01:41:14.600 get a hold of the tooling, because the tooling's got to be somewhere.

01:41:16.640 I always thought there could be this kind of a redone

01:41:18.760 version of them, probably in a more modern cartridge

01:41:20.680 like 308 or something else somebody would want and and there could be like actual manufacturing

01:41:25.480 of these beautiful hunting rifles and and predator protection rifles uh here in prince george i mean

01:41:31.240 surely if we can have craft breweries all the way up and down the the interior of british columbia

01:41:36.440 why can't craft i don't know gun manufacturers well rifle manufacturers yeah yeah i've i've

01:41:42.280 looked into that nathan uh because my buddy has a cnc lathe so we're like i looked into the rules

01:41:47.800 there's no rule that prevents you from manufacturing a legal firearm so yeah and i if

01:41:54.840 anybody's listening to the show there you go it's uh don't worry about the gun laws you're allowed

01:41:58.840 to make rifles you know as long as it's a non-prohibited weapon and or rifle and uh you

01:42:05.640 can uh let's get going let's start building these things yeah i i threw that idea to my buddy he's

01:42:10.280 he's got a cnc uh lathe and that would be an awesome idea i'd buy one um and i think we can

01:42:18.960 do it he knows yeah there's there used to be old uh firearm manufacturers in in canada that have

01:42:24.080 shut down and and uh you know that tooling probably all got bought up by someone overseas

01:42:29.360 who's making them and selling them back to us now and they all these old tools all this old

01:42:34.240 cast iron stuff like we've got to keep our hands on that and you know it's it's still out there

01:42:39.980 are still being sold and i don't know why all the stuff is being let go like

01:42:44.500 yeah i remember i remember someone being so uh interested this was interesting i when i was up

01:42:51.440 in churchill manitoba uh of course they're at the edge of the world so they needed to have their own

01:42:56.500 machine shops they have a lathe they had a and they had a bender and everything else and and

01:43:01.060 they had a machinist there who was their machinist for like 50 years right like like he was the man

01:43:06.360 who made all the parts for everything and because they were at the edge of the world they needed

01:43:10.680 they couldn't fly it in if they needed it now they needed it today right and he cared about his job

01:43:15.360 so much that he actually after he retired had this little lathe it was a shed that's smaller than the

01:43:21.640 studio i'm in right now the square foot literally like maybe maybe 10 by 12 at best and and in there

01:43:29.260 he had a little lathe and a bender and a drill prep like he had all this stuff figured out like

01:43:35.300 he had passed some days some some days some some years before and my my employer had purchased it

01:43:41.060 in an estate sale and he was bringing it all into his shop which is still stationed in churchill

01:43:45.860 and so and so it's still in the community and people will have access to it now it's in a more

01:43:50.100 usable space but it just like this was so important like i'm like if if people had just

01:43:55.140 taken that stuff and shipped it out of town you can bet that five minutes after it left on the

01:43:59.540 train people have been like i need this done or i need that done like why do we just give away

01:44:04.500 these things that are so important to both our society and to our heritage i don't understand

01:44:09.700 yeah well prince prince george you've got a good position where actually we have quite a lot of

01:44:13.780 machine shops in town my dad was a machinist here in town from the 70s onwards and and uh that was

01:44:20.340 kind of one of the cool things about clear lake not to go off on tangents here but that's one of

01:44:24.020 the mills that can force shut down that's where i grew up there basically there's a little trailer

01:44:28.660 park there and we had a trailer there we lived lived there a part-time uh when i when i worked

01:44:34.340 at the mill later on and he yeah my dad was a machinist and he got a job there this is a mill

01:44:40.100 right but as they're building stuff he's like well we could i could machine this and save a trip in

01:44:44.980 the town so clear lake developed its own little machine shop and that was our that was our

01:44:50.260 competitive advantage is that nobody else had a full machine shop like what clear lake had

01:44:54.820 and man we could buy we could run that mill basically all you ever had to buy was ball

01:45:01.080 bearings saw blades and some steel and then we could manufacture everything else so a lot of

01:45:06.900 the production stuff was all built in-house anything that broke like almost anything we'd

01:45:11.540 fix right there we built uh production line stuff to get around the softwood lumber agreement

01:45:16.980 so clear lake was one of the the cheater mills i don't know if you remember this is kind of an

01:45:22.480 interesting story of the history of the softwood lumber agreement but we ended up we oh my dad and

01:45:26.620 his buddies there they built a tool that would drill holes through every two by four on the

01:45:32.640 production line and that was so for construction you could run your uh wires through those holes

01:45:38.940 when you built your stud frame and so now it became a manufactured product and it was no longer

01:45:46.580 subject to the softwood lumber agreement so then we the clear lake pioneered that and then of course

01:45:52.080 all the other mills copied us and we were shipping loads of wood through the you know loophole through

01:45:57.440 the loophole in the agreement and made a bunch of money and that was all because we had our own

01:46:02.160 machine shop and some clever guys there that that thought about this kind of stuff and clear lake

01:46:07.840 was never an efficient mill right it was the most inefficient mill in british columbia every single

01:46:14.160 board was touched by a human hand multiple times uh we had when it was when canfor closed it down

01:46:20.640 in 2010 that had 364 employees in total and that included everybody in the office it had its own

01:46:28.720 office its own payroll department all that stuff even when can ford purchased it it was it so

01:46:34.080 it was entirely self-functioning business enterprise like right down to the people

01:46:38.960 that wrote the checks and and all that and we only ever produced 120 000 board feet a shift

01:46:46.240 which is peanuts it's nothing uh to put that in perspective polar the super mill in bear lake they

01:46:52.320 do 1.2 million board feet of shift so that's 10 times the production so we had a mill that hired

01:46:58.320 364 people that produced one tenth lumber of bear lake and it still made money it made money till

01:47:05.600 the day it shut down uh probably a lot to do with how cheap it was to run and how we could

01:47:13.600 be how we were self-sufficient how we made all of our own parts and rebuilt everything ourselves

01:47:20.000 and i think that's kind of a great metaphor for how we could run society you know we don't need

01:47:24.240 the most efficient society i think we just need to be self-sufficient and keep the money in-house

01:47:31.120 and that's how you build wealth and i think we need to to look at things a little differently

01:47:35.680 like that because you know sure so buddy sets up a gun shop and prince george and manufactures a

01:47:41.760 rifle it's cheaper to buy something that's made in china but that money if you buy the the maiden

01:47:48.080 prince george rifle you're all that money just stays in the community right and then that person

01:47:53.520 they can buy some other and if everybody kind of lives by the same ethic then they can support

01:47:57.600 their own community and all that money stays in the town our wealth and our we all become better

01:48:02.880 off that way you know it's when people start defecting to the cheapest thing that is offshore

01:48:07.760 that's when that's when we start to impoverish ourselves and that's basically the model of our

01:48:12.800 entire economy and i think we're seeing and that's slowly it's we're seeing the impact of this

01:48:19.440 gradually like all the homelessness you know people can't afford homes anymore

01:48:24.720 like you think that's just because people are like why didn't we have homeless people 30 years ago

01:48:31.200 in prince george there was one homeless guy in town and he would he they left the post office

01:48:36.080 door open and he could sleep where the mailboxes were that's what he did all winter that was it

01:48:42.080 like there was nobody on the street when it was pulled out in prince george when i was a kid

01:48:46.080 and if they were they had a place the government left the door open for them to sleep that's what

01:48:50.720 i remember and now we have like whole like the whole downtown is full of homeless people

01:48:55.940 like is that just because people have changed no the economy has changed the society has changed

01:49:02.040 the the the will for people to like work and support the society is evaporating because the

01:49:08.640 society and our the system we've built is only out for big money and big capital and the fat cats

01:49:16.240 it's not out for the average joe that's what's happening and that's that's why we need to change

01:49:22.060 things and stand up for ourselves up here and maybe we can turn it around and make a model for

01:49:26.340 for the rest of the country there's a guy i follow on facebook i'm not on twitter anymore

01:49:33.300 uh they've tried to convince me to go back i'm not interested in going back but uh there's a

01:49:38.460 guy i follow on facebook who who puts his tweets on facebook too and that's not a wolf dan sheehan

01:49:44.180 a kind of left uh left of center sort of guy populist sort of guy very anti neo neoliberal

01:49:50.100 the policies that shipped all our raw resources away and and destroyed manufacturing and the

01:49:54.680 the day he made the point of there's this poster up somewhere some motivational poster in some

01:49:58.660 office somewhere like you know diamonds they have coal has to be crushed into diamonds grapes have

01:50:03.700 to be crushed into wine when the pressure comes down like that that's just that's just life making

01:50:08.460 you better and he's like you know this is the thing i'm i'm not a grape i'm a person

01:50:13.500 like yeah that's what we're supposed to do with our workers it's like it's all about

01:50:19.600 mindfulness well i mind that i'm not being paid enough

01:50:22.920 i don't understand i mean there's there's an attractive part of that argument right that uh

01:50:32.140 that if you you know if you make a hard life makes us stronger right that's kind of i think

01:50:39.160 what these big corporations want us to believe and and you know the argument that well all these

01:50:45.360 mills got shut down in prince george because we were asking too much money for wages you know

01:50:49.960 like a mill worker expects 30 bucks an hour in prince george you know and they pay they pay a

01:50:54.240 mill worker minimum wage in the u.s south so we deserve to lose all our jobs right that's

01:50:59.420 i get it i get why people think that's an attractive argument sort of but at the same time

01:51:07.840 that's what the market bears right if you have a competitive market those high wages were the

01:51:13.040 result of a competitive market and if you don't have a competitive market anymore yeah they can

01:51:19.460 whittle your wages down and by that I mean if you have a single company dominating your town

01:51:23.820 then the mill worker doesn't have anywhere else to go and yeah then they're going to

01:51:28.220 then the big company will be in a position to grind you out and to reduce your wage and

01:51:34.780 make life harder for you and better for them right and I think that's a lot of these questions

01:51:40.840 and philosophical sort of, I don't know, arguments

01:51:45.640 can be resolved with a properly functioning competitive economy

01:51:51.980 and where you do have competition, where antitrust laws are enforced.

01:51:58.380 And Canada is just going the opposite direction.

01:52:01.160 Like, it's just crazy.

01:52:03.540 You know, one of the great American presidents,

01:52:05.640 Theodore Roosevelt, you know, he was a Republican.

01:52:07.840 And one of his most important policy accomplishments was hammering down on these huge monopolies.

01:52:16.480 You know, the big steel interests, the big coal interests, the big railroad interests.

01:52:20.640 Like that was a huge deal 100 years ago.

01:52:23.260 People knew that that was a problem then.

01:52:26.060 Why isn't it a problem now?

01:52:27.460 Why are we allowing all this stuff to happen?

01:52:30.400 You know, it's not just Canfor and Wes Fraser.

01:52:32.620 it's also telus and and these internet companies and and amazon and the costcos of the world

01:52:39.980 walmart save on grocery store and in town you know it's like they dominate every single

01:52:45.660 mid-sized grocery store in prince george is run by one company there's no competition

01:52:52.940 and i mean if you consider the super store is kind of the only competition to save on

01:52:57.980 and that's also a huge company that basically runs a monopoly right so personally i just i

01:53:07.220 shop at foothills foods i recommend everybody else support your local grocer and and it costs

01:53:13.660 more that's for sure but that money is going back in your community and and you help them you know

01:53:18.780 survive i kind of lost the train of thought but um that's okay no no no we're and we're getting

01:53:26.360 towards the end of our time here i was just thinking that just before we have to go because

01:53:30.040 the pipeline comes on uh in just a few minutes here but uh just before we go if people want to

01:53:36.040 learn more about stop the spray and the issues around forestry where should they go uh come to

01:53:42.360 our facebook page stop the spray bc there's a group and there's a page you can join the group

01:53:47.320 or follow the page if that's easier for you and yeah there's going to be some press hopefully

01:53:52.280 more stuff coming out about this contamination issue i did an interview with ckbg yesterday

01:53:57.880 so there might be some coverage there on uh tomorrow possibly there might be a little bit

01:54:02.440 of a broadcast on that stuff so i think the word's getting out about about the glyphosate thing and

01:54:09.240 yeah i guess we kind of veered off off that topic a little bit today but

01:54:13.720 it was awesome to do the show with you nathan hopefully we can do it again and

01:54:17.160 no it's been great and james and we we enjoy having you every time it's awesome

01:54:22.720 okay well right on um we will see you again i guess and uh i don't know what else to say

01:54:31.560 we should do a show maybe we should do we should do a northern uh some kind of northern separation

01:54:36.940 show with uh maybe aaron on there and darcy and yeah we'll get all of us on and we'll do a round

01:54:43.940 table you know what that's not a bad idea at all i'll i'll look for where that would fit into say

01:54:48.420 june because darcy's not coming back till the end of june so maybe we'll try for that right on yeah

01:54:57.620 thank you james bye bye bye of course that was james steidle of stop the spray british columbia

01:55:05.460 and he was talking to us about the nature of uh phosphate spray and how that works and the

01:55:11.620 problems the problems thereof i i think that kind of as a final bit of words from me here we do have

01:55:17.940 to get off a little bit earlier than we did yesterday because of course they want us off

01:55:21.300 about five minutes before the pipeline begins so that's at 10 55 pacific 11 55 mountain uh they'll

01:55:28.900 be on at noon obviously uh mountain and uh 11 pacific but the point is that as a final summary

01:55:36.420 for me i think that just as we were talking with dr havers earlier just talking to james now

01:55:43.220 ultimately things are changing in this country and it's not changing in the elites it's not

01:55:47.540 changing up top there except that they're getting more tyrannical and more selfish and more greedy

01:55:52.660 and more insane and probably incestuous if we're being honest the point is that that it's not

01:55:57.940 changing up there it's just getting worse in the ways that it was always bad up there but down here

01:56:02.500 below uh where the common man lives i think that there's there is a sense of solidarity building

01:56:08.520 and it's crossing partisan lines it's crossing ethnic lines cultural lines religious lines

01:56:12.920 even orientation lines uh as we can see with people agitating against the whole

01:56:17.560 uh transgender thing that for when it comes to minors when it comes to children and what's gotten

01:56:22.720 very out of hand there we had of course chris elston on the show earlier we'll have chris

01:56:27.040 elston again but as a final point uh for for me i think that again we come back to this this issue

01:56:34.340 of solidarity and if we can cross all these separating lines these things that separate us

01:56:41.100 from each other we can overcome what the elites are doing and we can actually make for a better

01:56:47.540 world whether that world looks exactly like the borders of canada as they do now whether it looks

01:56:52.660 like the borders of british columbia as they do now let alone the rest of the west uh and the rest

01:56:57.500 of canada i think that there's there's a clear line there's a clear line people are growing tired

01:57:03.580 of the deal that they're getting they're being rubbed raw and they're being and they feel like

01:57:07.880 they're getting robbed blind uh for looking for some alliteration there and uh that's not going

01:57:12.740 to stand for much longer the lockdowns haven't helped issues with covid haven't helped the

01:57:17.220 Housing prices haven't helped.

01:57:18.720 People are feeling left behind.

01:57:21.100 And this can't go on.

01:57:22.960 So hopefully that solidarity grows.

01:57:25.100 We will look forward to that show

01:57:26.600 probably in a month's time or so

01:57:28.980 where we do discuss what would it look like

01:57:31.060 a BC first, a Northern BC first,

01:57:33.400 a local BC first sort of political organization

01:57:37.680 and an agenda that would achieve that.

01:57:40.860 So that's all for me.

01:57:42.040 This was Mountain Standard Time.

01:57:43.500 I'm your host, Nathan Gita.

01:57:44.720 We'll be on bright and early tomorrow,

01:57:46.240 9 a.m pacific 10 a.m mountain aaron ekman starts off the show with us and we'll have

01:57:51.540 stewart parker come on in the second half we look forward to seeing you then have a great day

Western Standard - May 20, 2021

Mountain Standard Time - May 19, 2021

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