Western Standard - Mountain Standard Time - May 20, 2021

00:00:00.000 Thank you.

00:00:30.000 Thank you.

00:01:00.000 good morning and welcome to mountain standard time i'm your host nathan guida and today i'll

00:01:18.240 be joined by erin ekman in just a minute or two we're going to be doing our weekly news roundup

00:01:22.460 that we always do and then in studio a little later stewart parker will be joining us to give

00:01:27.640 his take on what's going on everywhere from Israel and Gaza out all the way to British Columbia with

00:01:33.200 the tourism industry. I'm sure he has some hot takes for us there. So let's get started with

00:01:37.900 our opening statement. According to the Vancouver Sun's David Kerrig, just days ago, the main players

00:01:43.280 trying to build the LNG plant in Kitimat are seriously considering pulling the plug. The

00:01:48.120 essential argument is that BC's regulatory commission on environment and major projects

00:01:52.920 has been stalling on giving final approval

00:01:55.760 to Australia's Woodside Petroleum

00:01:57.700 and their partner Chevron.

00:01:59.840 We are not strangers to projects being killed in British Columbia

00:02:02.760 because the regulatory regime fails to deliver decisions

00:02:05.520 in a timely fashion or prove itself to be reliably pro-development.

00:02:09.520 This is not a facet of our new provincial government, actually.

00:02:12.780 Enbridge's Northern Gateway pipeline was killed not by socialists,

00:02:16.400 but by the supposedly right-of-center B.C. Liberal government

00:02:19.340 under Premier Christy Clark.

00:02:20.860 This would be dry news at any other point in our history, but with inflation out of control due to the spending on COVID, let alone the economic devastation that has been wrought with lockdowns, etc., we could very well be headed into a recession in the near future.

00:02:36.040 Thus, every good-paying job is worth its weight in gold.

00:02:39.800 Any chance of their elimination is a mortal threat to our economic health.

00:02:44.520 Of course, both Chevron and Woodside might just be saber-rattling.

00:02:48.740 Energy companies love to threaten governments with abandoning plans or projects so they can get access to more tax credits and subsidies.

00:02:56.460 Even after that kind of generosity is shown by a city or a province or a nation, companies still allow their proposal to wither, pocketing the cash and leaving everyone without employment.

00:03:07.460 Perhaps the problem is we don't yet understand the ramifications of putting all our eggs into one basket.

00:03:14.080 British Columbia has always been a company town. There are more ghost towns in BC than anywhere

00:03:19.760 else because every nook and cranny of this western cordillera has been at one time or another

00:03:25.020 exploited by oligarchs looking for timber, oil, gas, copper, gold, aluminum, you name it,

00:03:32.440 they've been looking for it. So BC, Canada and the world over, maybe we need to remember that

00:03:38.320 the best kind of economy is one that is local and less reliant on outside actors, especially

00:03:42.960 companies that rival some governments in their power and reach. But at the same time, if one

00:03:49.120 wants to get into bed with Chevron or Shell or any of the other big companies, we must negotiate

00:03:54.700 our deals fairly and give a green light to the project before too long. Can't be untimely with

00:03:59.680 these things. I'm hopeful that we move up in the value-added chain soon. We have too many resources

00:04:05.080 to not use and to use them to make ourselves wealthy, but we must be careful that this wealth

00:04:10.380 always returns to the people who helped create it first that requires shrewd dealing by our leaders

00:04:15.780 as of right now i don't think i can have any confidence in the ability of any of our leadership

00:04:21.380 at just about any level to deal with threatening companies so we're going to go to aaron right away

00:04:26.400 we're going to take get his take on this aaron it's good to see you it's good to see you well

00:04:32.140 i mean there's a threat of kitimat lng uh falling apart but i mean we're going to talk about some

00:04:38.120 other things as well during this hour what what do we need to know about uh major projects and

00:04:43.760 when and when Canadians can feel like they're safe or they're not safe what what's going to happen

00:04:48.480 when we keep feeling like these projects are pulled away from us especially here in British

00:04:52.040 Columbia yeah I I mean I see it a little differently and I you know you should ask a

00:04:56.680 question to Stuart later in the day as well I mean he'll have a different take than I do I'm a

00:05:00.020 I'm a pro-development socialist which means that I'm not opposed to uh projects like Site C I'm

00:05:05.960 not even really opposed to LNG projects but from my perspective when you've got private corporations

00:05:12.560 like this particularly foreign ones that come in and they've got ownership over the infrastructure

00:05:17.480 they've got ownership over the project and they're and they're reaping most of the benefit and pulling 1.00

00:05:21.300 all that money a large like despite the jobs that are created and I admit that and I and I value

00:05:26.920 those the vast majority of the profits are siphoned out of the country and particularly out of the

00:05:31.120 province and so my approach to this which i know is controversial in in many quarters uh is to is

00:05:37.900 to go ahead with the project but to do so under the under the the tried and true method of what

00:05:42.940 i consider to be a crown corporation so from my perspective the way bc should be approaching these

00:05:47.720 projects especially when they're uh this vital to the economic sustainability and job creation

00:05:53.540 in the province is to expand like you know if i had my way i'd expand the mandate of of bc hydro

00:05:59.200 for instance, to encompass power and energy throughout the entire province, aside from just

00:06:03.420 hydroelectric generation and sale. And I would develop the projects that way. And I'd extend

00:06:10.260 that approach to refineries as well. I think, you know, I've got a lot of respect for Albertans,

00:06:16.740 and in particular, some of the more moneyed Albertans who, against the recommendation and

00:06:22.980 advice from many of the other folks in the oil and gas industry, still prove that it's possible

00:06:27.180 to build refineries in Alberta, which means you don't have to ship as much of the raw product

00:06:32.660 overseas, which is where all the value is generated. That's my approach to it. I don't

00:06:39.280 worry too much about the permanence of these kind of developments. Woodside Energy, they've divested

00:06:48.720 I think 50% of their stake out of the project. Of course, Chevron's evolved as well. These

00:06:53.880 companies are going to do that and they're going to they're going to do so they're always going to

00:06:57.080 blame the regulatory regimes but in a lot of cases it also has to do with commodity prices and and

00:07:01.740 they're going up and down and so they're just making decisions based on what makes most sense

00:07:05.700 for them financially in the current context uh but again i mean this is a highly profitable

00:07:10.920 industry if if the commodity prices is set right and and the resources in the ground somebody's

00:07:17.440 going to want to go get it my preference is that it's british colombians uh and british

00:07:21.900 Colombian companies, or in the best case scenario, a crown corporation owned and operated and

00:07:27.480 controlled by British Colombian taxpayers that developed this kind of vital infrastructure.

00:07:31.780 I have the same approach to pipelines.

00:07:34.480 There's a lot of controversy over this Line 5 Enbridge pipeline that back east that they're

00:07:39.940 trying to shut, that I think the governor of Michigan wants shut down and a number of

00:07:44.780 environmentalists in Canada want to shut it down.

00:07:47.720 this is a pipeline that delivers some pretty essential product and not just one product to

00:07:54.220 high urban density areas in Canada. Even the NDP, thankfully, has said, no, we're not in favor of

00:08:01.820 shutting that pipeline down. And there has to be some nuance to this. But my approach is,

00:08:06.900 and this is where my frustration, even with the NDP is, I wish they would take the old CCF position

00:08:10.700 and argue that if we have a piece of pipeline infrastructure

00:08:16.680 that is that vital to the interests of the country,

00:08:20.160 we really shouldn't be trusting it to a corporation

00:08:24.320 or a private corporation or a foreign corporation, for that matter.

00:08:28.340 It should be firmly within the hands of taxpayers via their government.

00:08:33.620 That's my approach to it.

00:08:34.460 It's probably controversial, but I wouldn't worry too much about this.

00:08:37.420 I think it's, again, as long as the resource isn't going anywhere.

00:08:40.700 and there's a need for it and so and companies are going to make these investment decisions as

00:08:45.320 they go along and to your point of private or public ownership of these things I think we got

00:08:51.300 a quick brief look back to the 1970s there gas crisis that happened the other week in the United

00:08:56.740 States that was of course a privately owned pipeline that was that was shipping refined

00:09:02.800 gasoline I believe refined products through its pipeline and people were of course well they were

00:09:08.440 pretty pretty upset lining up for gas and having shortages uh but i i it was steward who told us

00:09:14.220 last week that it actually wasn't a problem with the pipeline itself and even the hackers who had

00:09:17.980 gotten into it with the ransomware the problem was they couldn't bill people for what was in

00:09:22.120 the pipeline so the company uh definitely put its profits first for people and uh wouldn't refuse to

00:09:27.940 release the gas until it knew what its billings were going to be well in chevron in particular i

00:09:32.960 mean this is probably more about wood wood uh woodside energy but chevron in particular i mean

00:09:37.440 You can't get around the fact that it's one of the most, it literally is one of the most evil corporations on the face of the planet.

00:09:43.220 If you look at what they've done in Ecuador and in a number of different countries, I mean, they're currently going after an American human rights lawyer who just won, I think, a $10 billion settlement against Chevron for their activity in Ecuador against the people of Ecuador.

00:09:59.700 and because they couldn't get the department of justice in the u.s to take up a case against this

00:10:04.720 guy for whatever they're charging him with there's some new uh system in the states where they can

00:10:09.840 actually uh there can be like a court-appointed um lawyer from the corporation a court-appointed

00:10:15.980 prosecutor and of course it's it's like the the judicial system in the states isn't like canada

00:10:20.760 i mean you know there's there's a lot of room for for the justices down there to to be a little

00:10:25.980 shady and end up in the pocket of a corporation. And they are literally spending hundreds of

00:10:31.600 millions of dollars trying to put this guy in jail for simply having won a case against them

00:10:37.420 for approximately $10 billion as a settlement against their activities in Ecuador. And the

00:10:43.440 Americans are kind of astounded by this. They can't believe that there's this whole sort of

00:10:47.140 corporate judicial structure aside from the regular Department of Justice system that Chevron

00:10:52.240 is able to drag him through with a prosecutor that has ties to chevron with a judge that has

00:10:57.480 ties to chevron and this guy could end up in jail um and americans are not really used to this

00:11:03.440 happening it's starting to get a bit of attention but it really is it's it's nothing new for a

00:11:07.760 company like chevron they do this kind of stuff all over the world in fact you know in some cases

00:11:11.900 they they fund armed militias that go around and and kill dissent so uh like i i don't worry too

00:11:18.400 much when these companies decide, well, maybe it's not profitable enough for us to do this.

00:11:22.660 I'm more interested in, if we're going to extract the resource, British Columbians in

00:11:26.460 particular benefiting from it primarily and limiting the degree to which the profit from

00:11:31.400 that is siphoned out of the country into the coffers of companies like Chevron or some

00:11:37.220 Australian outfits.

00:11:38.360 So I'd like to see it developed.

00:11:40.600 But the frustration I have with the BCNDP in particular is there's just no vision from

00:11:45.280 a provincial perspective on how the province on behalf of the British Columbian taxpayer

00:11:50.320 can bring this stuff into fruition and ensure that the benefit of it is enjoyed by us first.

00:11:57.620 They just have no, I don't think the BC Liberals do either. I think the BC Liberals are quite

00:12:01.740 happy to sort of siphon that stuff out to foreign corporations, but the BC NDP is really no

00:12:06.980 different in this regard. They have just no vision. They haven't done anything to try to make

00:12:10.860 BC Hydro, the viable Crown Corp, that it definitely can be generating all sorts of profit for British

00:12:18.640 Columbia taxpayers. They just haven't made the regulatory changes necessary to do that. So I'm

00:12:22.440 not confident in that respect. Yes, we really could be like Hydro Quebec or bigger, but we need

00:12:29.940 the vision to do that. Speaking of British Columbia needing vision, you had some news items

00:12:36.040 queued up that you wanted to talk about today. That's what we do here on Thursdays is do the

00:12:39.780 news roundup uh last week we wanted to make sure we didn't confuse too many people so we got the

00:12:43.700 other aaron uh aaron gunn on uh to do his own news roundup so we're going to do news roundup

00:12:48.600 with aaron eckman now what what what's on your mind aaron well there was and by the way it was

00:12:53.920 i i was able to see that uh um the the show last week with aaron gunn i thought it was very good

00:12:59.360 he's he's he's an interesting one to watch i i uh i'll talk a little bit about the bc liberal

00:13:04.260 leadership race later in the program here. But I do hope that he throws his name in. I think he'll

00:13:10.760 be quite a disruptor in many respects. So there's three sort of items that have

00:13:15.660 been dominating question period this past week in Victoria. The first one is this,

00:13:23.960 what I call an FOI controversy regarding a new investment fund that has to the tune of a half

00:13:30.020 billion that the province has set up through the Ministry of Jobs, Innovation and Economic

00:13:35.020 Development, which is ministered by Ravi Callan. I'll talk a little bit about that. There's also

00:13:41.160 a bit of controversy about the Alaska cruise ship industry and some legislation that has just come

00:13:46.540 down from the U.S. Senate that will impact us here. And I wanted to spend most of the time

00:13:51.680 talking about the proposed changes coming down the pipe through the Electoral Boundaries Commission,

00:13:56.700 which I know you touched on last week, or maybe it was earlier this week, and I thought it was a

00:14:01.340 very good piece on it. Something that everybody in the interior in British Columbia should be

00:14:05.260 very concerned about, and we should spend some time talking about. So those are sort of the

00:14:09.300 three big headlines for the week. So I'll just start with the first one. As I said, Ravi Kavan,

00:14:16.280 who's the Minister of Jobs, Economic Recovery, Innovation, and he's kind of a newer minister,

00:14:21.920 but a rising star in that cabinet in particular.

00:14:26.300 I think, you know, he's a guy to watch in the sense that if Horgan doesn't run again

00:14:30.820 in the next election or steps down, he's probably a likely candidate for leadership.

00:14:36.440 And so, likewise, you know, the opposition will hone in on him for criticism, etc.

00:14:44.660 But he's been, this month, he's been under a fair bit of criticism from the official opposition

00:14:48.880 over a perceived lack of support for small businesses,

00:14:52.660 particularly in the COVID crisis.

00:14:55.200 And so his response to that was to set up an investment fund

00:14:59.140 funded by BC taxpayers to the tune of half a billion dollars,

00:15:02.380 500 million bucks.

00:15:03.760 And it's called NBC.

00:15:06.480 And you can see on your screen there,

00:15:08.700 this is the board that's been appointed.

00:15:10.840 I think there's some expertise from Vancity in there.

00:15:15.420 There's an economist from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

00:15:18.880 which, of course, is a different economic analysis than what many would consider to be the mainstream economic analysis.

00:15:25.560 You don't go ahead.

00:15:27.180 Not exactly from the Fraser Institute.

00:15:29.820 Well, I was just going to say, you don't see an economist there from the Fraser.

00:15:32.780 Full disclosure, I used to sit on the board of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alters as well.

00:15:36.640 But it's definitely a left wing progressive think tank.

00:15:43.060 And so an interesting choice on this kind of investment fund board, given that.

00:15:47.720 Oh, you see also the former finance minister, Carol James, is there sort of as a pre-retirement, something to keep her occupied, I suppose.

00:15:54.940 But it's, you know, it's essentially a venture capital investment fund focused at trying to throw money at B.C. firms.

00:16:05.160 There's nothing wrong with that.

00:16:07.760 Additional full disclosure, I mean, I also sit on the board of a very similar investment fund that's larger than this one that focuses on trying to,

00:16:14.840 It's got significant holdings in the tech sector, in particular venture capital holdings.

00:16:21.100 And I can tell you, it's a tough industry.

00:16:24.300 I mean, it's a tough sector because tech startups, it's kind of like the restaurant industry.

00:16:28.800 I mean, some of them succeed, others don't.

00:16:31.060 And the whole business model is sort of set up on trying to innovate something that nobody else has come up with

00:16:34.920 and then hope that one of the bigger fish either buy you or buy your product.

00:16:38.200 and if that doesn't happen they sort of they spend a lot of money and they don't really produce a lot

00:16:44.640 of return for investors that can be the challenge now I'm not particularly concerned about that I

00:16:50.160 think there is value in the public sector or the government putting a bit of investment fund into

00:16:58.120 BC firms that's that's not the controversy what the opposition is honed in on here is that the

00:17:04.100 minister has decided that the investment fund will be and presumably the dealings of the board

00:17:09.720 will be exempt from uh every other like from the FOI the freedom of information regime that every

00:17:17.100 other crown corporation or public sector institution is uh is beholden to which means

00:17:23.980 that reporters won't be able to uh submit FOI requests to get information that they don't

00:17:29.960 otherwise have from this investment fund. That's not a good thing. If you're setting up an

00:17:36.460 investment fund and you're investing money in a highly volatile sector, you definitely want

00:17:42.640 the public to have some level of understanding of what's happening there. And it's just mind

00:17:50.720 boggling that they would decide not to do this. Of course, the rationale is, well, we might let

00:17:56.640 out some sensitive information presumably about the firms we're investing in. But that doesn't

00:18:01.920 seem like an adequate response really given that you can file an FOI on the funding that's going

00:18:08.840 out and the deliberations of the investment fund because it's a public entity. But the FOI doesn't

00:18:15.340 give you additional information about the firms that the fund is investing in. So I don't understand

00:18:20.500 how any trade secrets of BC firms are going to be leaked out through an FOI that's filed

00:18:26.760 to the fund.

00:18:28.880 So it's just, I mean, the danger here is that it sets up the perception that this minister

00:18:35.000 has a half a million dollar, or sorry, half a billion dollar slush fund to sort of throw

00:18:39.420 around in ways that he or the board is determining.

00:18:43.100 I don't think that's actually what they intend to do, but it certainly leaves room for that

00:18:47.280 perception.

00:18:47.840 if they continue to exempt it from basic FOI legislation.

00:18:51.780 So it's just a baffling development, a baffling decision from that ministry.

00:18:56.880 One that I hope they turn around on,

00:18:58.540 because I think the opposition will ride this one pretty far if they don't.

00:19:02.120 It's just, it's one of those things that, you know,

00:19:04.740 you look down the pipe given the track record of all governments in this province

00:19:08.120 and some of the shady dealings, you know,

00:19:11.260 we got money laundering issues in British Columbia.

00:19:13.300 Like British Columbia, as much as we all love it, is a haven for shady activity.

00:19:17.840 And when you're setting up a fund like this from government that's going to the private sector directly, you want the highest level of transparency.

00:19:25.980 You want British Columbians to have confidence that it's being spent properly.

00:19:30.120 And even if you're not making money, that's not the point.

00:19:33.820 The point is to try to incubate and help and support private tech firms in British Columbia, which is absolutely something government should be doing.

00:19:41.220 Just be transparent about it.

00:19:42.460 I mean, it's just silly that they're not.

00:19:43.660 So that was a bizarre development.

00:19:47.840 um the second maybe maybe something to do a little bit there aaron is just the fact that

00:19:55.580 this is crucial like we need to know who these people are trying to give money to we need to

00:20:02.580 know how often they're meeting to discuss that we need to know what kind of monies are rolling out

00:20:07.040 of there the idea that you could keep this from the public it's absolutely insane like that's not

00:20:12.640 you can't do that it's just it's just nonsense well i can and that's the that's the problem but

00:20:18.840 it's like why would you you know um because you know if we don't know why you're doing it

00:20:25.440 we're going to make up our own reasons and they're not going to be flattering for you and and given

00:20:30.820 sort of the track record like i said of bc being a haven for some fairly shady activity people kind

00:20:35.300 of expect that if you're not showing what you're if you're not showing your work you're up to

00:20:38.560 something and uh and if you've got an opposition that's you know full-time suggesting that you

00:20:43.800 probably are up to something then it's just I mean it's just one of those easy things that should be

00:20:47.800 easy to get right and and uh and they're not anyway there's a couple more items that are

00:20:52.960 probably more important than this one but this one just struck me as uh as bizarre you've probably

00:20:57.120 heard if you've been following any of the news in BC a bit of controversy and concern over the

00:21:02.260 Alaska cruise ship industry so just to kind of provide some color for for folks who may not be

00:21:08.280 aware. There's legislation in the U.S. that requires U.S. ships, cruise ships that are heading

00:21:13.520 up to Alaska to stop in one of the ports in British Columbia on the way there. I'm not too

00:21:19.480 familiar with the reasoning for that legislation. It's probably safety related. But the reason they

00:21:24.520 stop in Vancouver or they stop in Prince Rupert on the way up, it's partially because the people

00:21:29.540 riding the ship might want to stop in those areas, but it's also that they're required to. They have

00:21:33.920 to refill they have to restock and that kind of thing so you go back to february and you know

00:21:40.040 where we're in the thick of the third wave and and cases are spiking uh the alaskan senator was

00:21:46.880 petitioning the bc government as was the the cruise ship industry saying look uh we understand

00:21:54.340 that you had to restrict us from stopping in your ports because of covid etc but can we start

00:21:58.620 talking about ways to try to mitigate the economic impact from that because you know it's like it's

00:22:04.320 a two billion dollar industry I think for British Columbia 130 million annually alone goes to

00:22:08.900 Victoria as a result of these and if you walk down into into Gastown you can see the effects

00:22:13.300 that the cruise ship industry's had on Gastown Gastown is essentially in Vancouver like a tourist

00:22:17.340 sector and it's just like you know Canadianish stores flag shops and that kind of thing stuff

00:22:23.360 that no local would ever buy, but it demonstrates that there's significant economic impact from the

00:22:29.960 cruise ships coming in. So the British Columbia government, the premier in particular, when he's

00:22:36.820 being petitioned and contacted by the Alaskan senator, et cetera, just kind of brushed them

00:22:41.560 off and ignored it and said, you know, like it's COVID, you know, what are we going to do? So the

00:22:48.500 Alaskan senator decided, okay, well, I'm going to go to the U.S. Senate and I'm going to try to

00:22:54.200 pass legislation that allows, that exempts cruise ships from having, from this legislation that

00:23:00.420 requires them to stop in British Columbia, which means they now can just go straight to Alaska.

00:23:05.460 Temporary legislation, but solves their problem. Well, when the opposition raised this with the

00:23:11.480 province, the premier basically said, we're not worried about it. It's not likely to pass. Well,

00:23:15.800 it passed and it passed unanimously and not only did it pass unanimously but the alaskan senator

00:23:21.560 is also and he's got a few friends now as well are also looking to try to get it permanent so that

00:23:28.440 uh even after covid's over there's no requirement for those those ships to stop in british columbia

00:23:32.720 so so this is an industry which uh employs about 20 000 people i'm not sure how many of those are

00:23:39.200 from british columbia i imagine it's a rather transient workforce as well so they probably

00:23:44.160 come from all over, but I mean, it's not insignificant. And so the premier now is

00:23:48.500 really trying to basically scramble. He's calling up the Alaskan senator today and probably not

00:23:55.320 getting much of a response. I mean, they, you know, I think they're, so, so the, this has given

00:23:59.300 a lot of fuels to the opposition that, that the premier and the, especially the minister of

00:24:04.980 tourism, Melanie Mark, who is new in this role. She just, she used to be the minister of advanced

00:24:09.600 education uh is is quite embattled over this and has responded um in interesting ways uh

00:24:16.880 they we've actually got a we've got a clip um uh of her that maybe we can run here actually

00:24:24.200 uh this is going back to i think uh monday during question period it's no surprise that

00:24:30.700 the official opposition are going to come in here drumming up fear as they always do

00:24:34.880 It's not as though the tourism industry isn't already affected by a global pandemic.

00:24:40.640 To add extra fear, they're adding salt to the womb. 0.98

00:24:43.840 So shame on the members' opposite. 0.76

00:24:45.300 But let's go to the facts.

00:24:46.640 They talked about the law.

00:24:48.160 You know, they talk about being expert.

00:24:50.600 A bill was passed through the Senate has to go through the House of Representatives to become a law.

00:24:56.220 It has to be signed by the President of the United States.

00:24:59.700 And it needs the approval of the CDC.

00:25:02.940 So you know what?

00:25:03.500 there are some steps that need to be taken but for right now all hands are on deck we are working

00:25:08.960 with this sector because we know that we are and we are confident we are arrogant

00:25:13.600 in our confidence that we are a part of choice there's a mutual mutual interest for visitors to

00:25:21.400 visit our court here in victoria and we'll just stop it there i mean this was uh that played really

00:25:28.400 well at the next uh general election we are arrogant in our confidence they're going to use

00:25:32.760 back over and over and over again well i'm actually i'm actually surprised at how little

00:25:38.120 attention is garnered the only people i've seen sort of pick up on it were a couple like one or

00:25:42.060 two liberal bc liberal aligned commentators uh but even they sort of soft peddled it because i think

00:25:47.940 you know everybody kind of recognized and you can see in her expression as soon as it came out of

00:25:51.960 her mouth she sort of realized oh what have i just said and you know i've got some sympathy for for

00:25:58.180 this i like i don't read notes either uh if and when i've ever spoke in front of people and so

00:26:02.880 sometimes stuff just comes out that you didn't mean to say but it you know these kind of gaps

00:26:07.960 what make them so interesting is that it it totally plays into exactly how the opposition

00:26:12.560 wants to cast you so i know she'll be heading you know right after she said that i'm sure she was

00:26:17.520 swarmed by an army of communications professionals waving their finger at her saying this is why you

00:26:22.200 have to read our notes and i hope she doesn't like okay you know i hope she she's a i've got

00:26:27.840 some go ahead just hot takes yeah i mean she's i've got some time for she's a bit of a scrapper

00:26:34.360 she sort of shoots from the hip um and it's interesting to see you know how she's responding

00:26:39.600 to this heat because she was uh the minister of advanced education which is no small portfolio 0.83

00:26:43.860 that's that's the minister uh responsible for all the post-secondary institutions universities 0.94

00:26:48.060 colleges in the province but it but it's it's usually a pretty easy portfolio when there's a

00:26:53.820 bcndp government in place because they usually put some kind of a cap on tuition increases which

00:26:58.280 placates all the student unions and you know the university administrations never really

00:27:03.720 complain too much um as long as they're getting funded which they are so she didn't really have

00:27:09.420 to go through uh too much heat when she was in that portfolio and i don't think anybody really

00:27:14.340 expected that she would have to take too much heat from the opposition as Minister of Tourism

00:27:19.720 when she got that in the last shuffle, except COVID hit, and the tourism ministry has been

00:27:25.420 really suffering in British Columbia, and so she has been on the hot seat.

00:27:29.340 In response to calls from the opposition for more support for the tourism ministry,

00:27:34.180 she actually announced, I think two days ago, a $50 million aid package, essentially, for tourism.

00:27:40.760 but when you when you look into it in more detail and it's quite concerning for those of us in the

00:27:45.960 interior it's pretty clear that the vast majority of those funds are going to be aimed towards lower

00:27:51.920 mainland and and the island with almost nothing uh really for the tourism industry in the interior

00:27:59.460 which strikes me again as something that should have been quite easy uh for the government to get 0.50

00:28:04.600 win on uh given that the interior is uh like it's a it's a desert for the ndp in many respects

00:28:11.240 with with with very few exceptions but the most concerning development the folks that run the

00:28:16.980 williams lake stampede which has had considerable difficulties and had to cancel last year because

00:28:21.700 of covid they looked at the application process they've concluded they don't even qualify

00:28:25.720 so you know you got the situation now where government um uh is going to throw all sorts

00:28:32.680 of money and support at the P&E, which happens to be in this minister's riding, or just outside

00:28:39.440 of it, or maybe I think it is in there. And so it's going to strike people in the interior,

00:28:44.240 I think, as quite problematic, and I don't use that word lately, if the P&E gets all sorts of

00:28:51.420 support, but the Williams Lake Stampede can't get a dime. So it's just another one of these

00:28:58.180 examples of this major uh focused disparity in victoria uh and vancouver in particular between

00:29:04.720 the interests of those in the lower mainland on the island versus the rest of us up in the interior

00:29:09.020 uh so you know i mean this is i think they'll have to they're gonna have to take a pretty close

00:29:15.280 look at how this application process works out because it's you know what a terrible development

00:29:19.980 if the stampede which for a second year isn't going to be able to run in williams lake which

00:29:24.100 is a huge economic boon for that community in particular uh can't get a can't get a bloody

00:29:28.540 dime out of this government uh even though they've given 50 they're they're pledging 50 million dollars

00:29:33.280 in aid you know i think that another aspect of this is that if you're looking at tourism in

00:29:40.660 british columbia it's also just like everything else in british columbia it's so diverse and

00:29:45.340 what is 50 million even going to do if people need to be given people need to be given uh some kind 0.73

00:29:50.900 of subsidy or some kind of write-off, something to kind of cancel out the strain that they're

00:29:55.460 going through right now, that's fine. I understand that. You know, I happen to know somebody pretty

00:30:00.580 well over at the CRA who explains in no uncertain terms what their rent subsidies are doing and how

00:30:05.860 they're trying to help people with that stuff. That's important. It's important that we keep

00:30:10.060 things afloat as best as we can and make the loss less sharp and try and help people. But at the

00:30:15.560 same time the question becomes is 50 million even enough and even if it was enough or it isn't and

00:30:21.700 and it needs to be expanded why isn't the focus more general we don't want fly fishing to die in

00:30:26.520 british columbia i can't wait for stewart to comment on that one we don't want we don't want

00:30:30.600 the essential the essential jobs thing it's he's going to rant about that in a few minutes

00:30:35.580 but the but we don't want those things to go away we don't want hunting to suffer we need

00:30:39.620 and a lot of this is internationally based bc is an international place it does international

00:30:44.960 tourism people come from other places to see beautiful bc so i it's kind of silly to me that

00:30:50.480 uh the minister would wouldn't think that she needs to hand out you know if she's going to hand

00:30:55.580 things out that she isn't going to hand out help uh north of hope i don't know why she isn't doing

00:30:59.900 that yeah and it's not just her i mean it's this it's this ongoing sort of trend of reconfirmation

00:31:07.060 for folks in the interior that um this government really doesn't care about us and i mean that's

00:31:12.560 not something I think that is uh exclusive just to the NDP there were there were complaints about

00:31:17.340 this even with the BC Liberals but uh it's um it is interesting that it is a bit of an electoral

00:31:24.120 desert for the for the BC NDP in the interior I mean even you know I always use the example of

00:31:28.740 uh of Skeena where Ellis Ross is elected uh who's been on this show a couple of times

00:31:34.200 who's who's thrown he was the first to throw his name in his leadership of the of the BC Liberal

00:31:38.540 party. And I perfectly honest, uh, hope he does quite well. I hope he wins. Uh, cause it'd be

00:31:43.920 wonderful to have again, somebody from the interior running a major political party with

00:31:48.260 the potential of becoming the premier. I don't know if we've had that since, uh, the Bennett's

00:31:53.640 frankly. Um, but, uh, you know, like, how are you going to, how are you going to build or rebuild

00:32:00.500 your base, uh, in a place like terrorists, which used to be an NDP stronghold for decades, uh,

00:32:06.940 Terrace, Kitimat, you know, those towns.

00:32:11.500 And they've lost it now twice to a BC Liberal candidate,

00:32:16.880 one who is a former High Isla Nation chief councillor.

00:32:22.420 And the NDP has only been able to run white men against him.

00:32:28.740 So it just cuts against their narrative on so many fronts.

00:32:31.640 and the division between the urban and like the urban rural divide in British Columbia is palpable

00:32:38.080 and it's growing and all you sort of hear from the NDP are excuses about it and how it's being

00:32:44.700 overplayed well I mean come up here and talk to people it's not being overplayed it's palpable

00:32:49.060 people feel it you can feel it as you walk around and talk to folks and and it's because they keep

00:32:53.380 seeing these examples and here's another one as a good segue to our to our next sort of

00:32:58.500 controversial issue of the of the week uh the attorney general david eby who folks that have

00:33:06.020 been watching bc politics for some time will know is a has always been a huge proponent of

00:33:10.740 proportional representation proportional representation has been i think trounced

00:33:15.920 three times in british columbia and soundly each time uh and i'm quite delighted by that i'm uh

00:33:22.400 You know, when I was younger and more naive and was living through a BC Liberal government and really wanted to see the NDP elected, I was always of the belief that a proportional representation system would make it easier for progressive governments to get elected.

00:33:37.940 but the you know as I started to look into it more especially as we got into refer you know

00:33:45.420 I think the second and third referendum on it I started to ask some pretty pointed questions to

00:33:50.180 some of the real advocates and I even interviewed some of the most prominent advocates at the time

00:33:54.720 who were who were arguing for this and asked a very simple question which was how do we ensure

00:34:00.520 that interior writings don't lose a ratio of seats that we currently have in the legislature

00:34:06.920 and was never able to get an answer on that because the answer is you can't when you have

00:34:15.240 proportional representation which is basically you know it apportions seats to parties based on

00:34:20.620 how many votes they get it's based on population the high the high urban density areas the high

00:34:27.340 population areas are going to get more seats they're going to get more and so it would have

00:34:32.080 had the effect, if it had passed, of expanding the size of the rural ridings and reducing the

00:34:40.540 size of the urban ridings with the effect of increasing the number of urban ridings vis-a-vis

00:34:45.580 the rural ones so that we have fewer votes in the legislature. Well, they failed on that. They

00:34:51.080 failed on it a third time. There's all sorts of reasons why they failed on it. And my take on it,

00:34:56.300 you know, David Eby, the Attorney General, I think has always been a very open proponent of it and

00:35:01.200 really wanted it to pass but I think he was a minority even in the NDP cabinet on that even

00:35:06.200 though the NDP campaigned heavily for it you saw the premier come out in favor of it but it kind

00:35:10.880 of reminded a lot of people of the old wards election in Vancouver under Larry Campbell and

00:35:16.980 you know I might be dating myself a little bit but people who will recall that referendum in

00:35:22.000 Vancouver trying to trying to switch from sort of an at-large system where everybody runs in the

00:35:27.140 same pool and whoever gets the most votes gets on the city council they wanted a more toronto

00:35:32.740 style system where it's sort of the city's divided up into like little ridings or wards

00:35:36.860 and so you get elected just by the voters in your area right and so uh they wanted to move to that

00:35:43.340 but larry campbell didn't really want to but he got elected on this coalition that really wanted

00:35:47.140 it so he was in the situation of holding this referendum to make the change but not really

00:35:51.620 wanting it to pass well that's my take on how the ndp approached proportional representation

00:35:55.820 look I you know I used to be a vice president of the NDP I sat in the rooms where they've decided

00:36:01.640 you know and talked about like what's our what's our winning strategy here and I've had people look

00:36:06.540 me in the eye as I've complained about how we were losing ground in the interior year over year over

00:36:11.940 year just look me in the eye and say point blank we don't need the interior to win which to me is

00:36:19.220 like the most unsustainable strategy of any party to take that. I'm not saying this came

00:36:26.160 from anybody, you know, any official legislators in government. This is like party hacks and

00:36:34.620 organizers, etc. But there is this underlying sentiment within the BCNDP that, you know,

00:36:41.640 the interior is kind of a write-off. They're all socially conservative. They're never going to

00:36:45.640 vote for us they like their guns and uh and so proportional representation i think was one way

00:36:52.080 to sort of deal with their difficulty in getting elected given how many seats the interior has

00:36:57.020 vis-a-vis the population well they failed on that and so they're they've come up with a new strategy

00:37:03.060 and so the attorney general on monday introduced a new bill which changes proposes to change the

00:37:10.720 legislation which guides the uh electoral boundaries commission which is technically

00:37:16.280 an independent body which is supposed to take every few years when it's directed by the attorney

00:37:21.620 general we'll take a look at the writings and decide okay do we need to make any changes to

00:37:25.380 the boundaries uh and so it's usually an agency which governments can hide behind and say well

00:37:31.780 we didn't make that we're not gerrymandering anything it's the electoral boundaries commission

00:37:35.340 they're consulting with the province they're they're running the numbers they're going to

00:37:38.720 make the decision on what the changes should be. Except that what they leave out when they describe

00:37:44.280 it that way is that the Electoral Boundaries Commission is guided by and driven by legislation

00:37:50.200 passed by government. And the legislation that government has just introduced removes the cap

00:37:57.220 of 87 seats and allows for up to six new seats. It also requires the Electoral Boundaries Commission

00:38:06.480 in any riding that has changed since its last week by plus or minus 25 percent in population

00:38:13.980 to recommend that riding for a change well that right there explains exactly what the plan is

00:38:21.720 so where are the big population growth centers in British Columbia well they're in Surrey they're in

00:38:26.940 the Fraser Valley they're in every riding where the NDP either has a fairly long standing stronghold

00:38:34.620 or has just won it um there it's all in NDP territory basically so what the eventual outcome

00:38:42.800 looks to be here is that you'll see a few more ridings in Surrey you'll see a few more ridings

00:38:47.860 in the Fraser Valley you could see fewer ridings in the interior John Rustag came out against this

00:38:53.800 last week uh probably first uh and Corley Oaks from the Caribou uh hasn't been around forever

00:39:00.800 um uh but i think that's i think that's bob simpson's old riding actually that's correct

00:39:06.020 yeah yeah which used to be an ndp stronghold riding it's now again like you know one of

00:39:11.360 those ridings where the ndp can't can't win there anymore i mean she's really taking this on she's

00:39:15.980 she's been uh uh quite good actually in the in the committee debate on this uh explaining that look

00:39:22.860 i mean you've got this you've got these ridings that are already larger than many many european

00:39:27.300 countries geographically you got to drive around them i mean if you're up in uh uh you know if

00:39:32.180 you've got atlin in your riding it's like you got to go through what is it i think you got to go

00:39:36.060 through the yukon to get there it's a two-day drive from terrace just to get there and then a 1.00

00:39:40.360 two-day drive back right uh and so you've got the you got these mlas that have to travel around all

00:39:45.560 these places but here's the bigger issue the only people that ever make the argument that ridings 1.00

00:39:52.920 need to be perfectly apportioned based on population are the ones that are in the high

00:39:57.300 population areas because that argument serves people that live in the high population areas.

00:40:03.500 And so it's a huge problem for interior ridings where British Columbians in the interior already

00:40:09.920 feel like Victoria doesn't even know we exist, that the commercial interests in Vancouver

00:40:16.300 are only view us as basically a resource base and are not concerned about the health of

00:40:21.520 the communities up here and it's not a good move for a government that is really struggling to get

00:40:27.960 any kind of electoral victory in those areas uh and i you know i mean i think it's a it's a real

00:40:37.080 problem for folks in the interior it's something that just enrages me uh that when we've got a

00:40:42.640 province like ours which is so disparate in terms of its interest between between the interior

00:40:47.860 ridings in the lower mainland where half of the population is crammed into this tiny little area

00:40:51.940 in the southwest corner that the rest of us could just be sort of ignored. And so if you want to

00:40:57.500 hold your political vehicle together, your coalition together, if you want to hold British

00:41:02.180 Columbia together, then you have to ensure that the vast majority of the people living in the

00:41:08.920 geography, like the rest of the geography, feel like they've got some level of representation.

00:41:13.860 You can't take that representation away.

00:41:16.840 I mean, at a much larger scale, this sort of dynamic exists in Quebec right now vis-a-vis

00:41:21.760 the rest of Canada.

00:41:23.260 But I really, I have some serious concerns that with the sort of the arguments that are

00:41:29.800 taking place between leaders in the interior versus government forces in Victoria, that

00:41:35.700 this will exacerbate things.

00:41:37.620 And I, you know, I'm not a BC Liberal supporter, but I got to hand it to people like John

00:41:41.560 Rustad and Corley Oaks for taking this on. And I hope it is something that they really run with.

00:41:48.700 And I hope that British Columbians in the interior make it clear that if you're going to move this

00:41:56.260 direction, there's going to be political consequences in the sense that we're losing

00:42:00.220 any sense of belonging in our own province. And it really starts to incubate these conversations

00:42:06.760 about, you know, is it even possible to start reconceptualizing what our own provincial

00:42:11.380 boundaries look like, never mind the electoral boundaries? And to that point, exactly. I think

00:42:17.780 I ended that column on that question with, well, I mean, if you thought Western sovereignty could

00:42:22.860 get out of hand, just wait until, you know, the Northern British Columbians show up and tell you

00:42:28.240 that they're not playing this game anymore. And we shouldn't play this game anymore. Northern BC

00:42:33.780 is a diverse place people think that it's all guns and god and you know who knows what else

00:42:38.240 and a couple of uh you know uh vietnam draft dodgers and a bunch of libertarians living in

00:42:44.280 in you know the nooks and crannies of bc the ghost towns of bc northern bc now it is all those

00:42:49.640 things but it's even more than that and it's a place where there's some really truly conservative

00:42:54.220 and green conservative ideas with some truly progressive fiscally conservative progressive

00:42:59.160 ideas there's all sorts of interesting ideas up here there's towns that are really having to work

00:43:03.460 their way through all sorts of questions around environment around homelessness addiction you know

00:43:08.820 where where's the place of the community what how do we find belonging with one another how do we

00:43:13.180 heal the wounds of the past i bc uh north of hope beyond hope is a is a beautiful place and it's got

00:43:19.820 a lot of things going for it and the fact that it's been so pigeonholed by our current progressive

00:43:24.420 government in air quotes is just nonsense and the fact that they're going to now try and take their

00:43:29.380 voice away where all their food all their energy comes from the people who bother to actually ship

00:43:35.420 their goods across the rest of the country this is nonsense this is not going to stand and people

00:43:40.220 people are not going to stand for this well and it yeah i mean it's i don't think there's much

00:43:46.060 that can be done to really stop it from happening because honestly i don't think

00:43:48.960 uh you know i mean it's pretty predictable how it's going to play out the bcndp is going to hide

00:43:53.140 behind the electoral boundaries commission the electoral boundaries commission is going to have

00:43:56.440 to make a determination based on the rules that have been set for it by the bc government uh and

00:44:02.620 look the bcndp they know they've got a tenuous hold on power uh it's the reason we had an election

00:44:08.660 a year early they didn't do that because you know despite all the reasons that they told us we had

00:44:14.160 to have the election and and to be clear i mean to under full disclosure here i didn't oppose them

00:44:20.100 holding the election when they did uh i thought there was actually like i i didn't necessarily

00:44:25.420 take them at face value but if they were genuine in what they were saying it was an argument that

00:44:30.700 that resonated with me and the argument went like this look uh when we first got elected in 2017

00:44:36.600 nobody knew covid was coming uh things have changed substantially we're in the middle of you

00:44:41.080 know we're between we're just coming down off the second wave here and we feel like we have to make

00:44:46.320 significantly different decisions than we campaigned on in 2017 and we want a mandate from from the

00:44:52.660 the population from voters to do that. That's fine. I actually don't have a problem with a

00:44:57.600 government collapsing themselves before the four-year term. I don't believe in fixed election

00:45:02.780 dates because I don't think any government should be given the maximum amount of time allowable by

00:45:07.660 default. I think government should govern until they're basically out of ideas or they don't

00:45:13.720 have a mandate anymore, and then they should seek a new mandate. I have no problem with frequent

00:45:17.040 elections but it was pretty clear what the reasoning the real reasoning behind this was

00:45:23.380 and they and it was that they had the site c report coming out that was going to you know

00:45:27.560 despite my support for site c it's way over budget and there's considerable uh geotechnical

00:45:34.480 difficulties with it which the bcndp didn't necessarily want people to know about um and

00:45:40.900 they knew that was coming out they want to get the election done before that because they were

00:45:43.720 worried about losing green votes that they would have had to rely on previously the province the

00:45:49.480 budget was in terrible shape they weren't even set up to be able to put together a budget that

00:45:53.080 year for goodness sakes and they got the sense that like you know over time their support amongst

00:45:59.840 the electorate was was going to decline and so they made a strategic decision as unpopular as

00:46:04.400 they thought it might be to hold the snap election collapse themselves they trumped up some ridiculous

00:46:09.860 reason why the green they couldn't work with the greens anymore it was over a mental health

00:46:13.220 uh uh issue that had had it had no mention in the casa agreement whatsoever so so the greens

00:46:19.940 were under no obligation to go along with the bcndp on this nevertheless the the premier blamed

00:46:25.000 their their opposition on that particular piece of legislation for uh the collapse of the coalition

00:46:31.680 essentially and and that's that's upon upon which he launched the election so they knew things were

00:46:37.300 going to get worse and they called the election for that reason uh and so you know i mean that's

00:46:43.580 that's that's where we're at now um they they know now that uh proportional representation hasn't

00:46:51.140 passed that under the current alignment of seats and the current number of seats it's a it's a it's

00:46:59.240 a toss-up they're losing ground on the island they've essentially lost the interior they've

00:47:04.780 done very well in the lower mainland and they've done very well in some lower mainland uh ridings

00:47:09.880 which they traditionally haven't done very well i mean they have uh they've got abbessford where um

00:47:13.800 uh what's his name there lori thrones got tossed out right but they know they probably won't be

00:47:18.600 able to hang on to that again so this is really their their best uh attempt to ensure that in the

00:47:25.100 next election that they've got a hope of holding on and it is gerrymandering i mean it just is

00:47:30.260 especially from the perspective of people in the interior and and if you're going to make the

00:47:34.720 argument based solely on population I mean there's so many examples of how that's a terrible way to

00:47:40.200 to ride over the rights of minority populations especially disadvantaged populations and if any

00:47:49.300 of these folks would drive through the interior and drive through some of these towns and if they

00:47:53.600 if they had been around long enough to know what it was like to drive through those towns 15 20

00:47:59.420 years ago I would say more like 20 years ago they would see the stark difference and I drive this

00:48:05.400 province a lot I have you know through work and also just because I love it and I you know I try

00:48:10.900 to stop in every single town and buy at least one thing which is my way of doing my part to try to

00:48:16.000 help the economies of these places but it can be depressing if you've lived up here all your life

00:48:20.960 to know what it was like in the 70s and the 80s and into the early 90s and then to see how these

00:48:26.280 towns are suffering now the population decline when I lived in Terrace in the 80s I think the

00:48:30.600 population was around 22,000 people it's down to about 14 now Prince Rupert has decreased by about

00:48:35.540 the same margin um Kitimat's fairly fairly stable in terms of population but it's decreased as well

00:48:42.700 it's uh it's tough people are hurting up here and you talk to people in the lower mainland about it

00:48:48.300 I've literally had people say to me why are people even in those towns like why do we even need those

00:48:53.220 towns i mean that's the mentality down there and so when you have a province with those with those

00:48:58.120 kind of dynamics where all of the political power and all of the wealth even though it comes from

00:49:03.320 up here gets siphoned down there and gets to and how its use is determined down there people up

00:49:08.560 here don't feel like they have any representation anymore and this is what's so interesting to me

00:49:12.660 about about western separate separatist sentiment uh it's it's always been fairly healthy in alberta

00:49:19.780 um the difficulty without for alberta of course is that it hasn't been as clear cut in bc and so

00:49:27.000 if your goal is to be able to you know free yourself from the from the regulatory shackles

00:49:32.480 of a of a federal government that doesn't understand your industry and doesn't care about it

00:49:37.300 uh then you want to get your product to tidewater difficulty is you got to go through british

00:49:42.920 columbia for that well british columbia is not alien to separatist sentiment either but it's a

00:49:48.000 little different. It's not so much this burning desire to leave Canada in my estimation. It's

00:49:55.960 always been like the hatred of Ontario and Toronto in BC is only slightly mitigated by the hatred of

00:50:05.180 Vancouver. And they sort of exist on the same tier. People like to travel to Vancouver, sure,

00:50:12.520 for shopping and stuff but there is this dislike for the power structure down there because there's

00:50:18.440 this alienation i never really fully understood it when i was younger when my parents would talk

00:50:21.720 about it a lot like how how alienated and isolated they felt from the political machinations of down

00:50:27.420 south i start to feel it and understand it more as i get older uh and recognize how common it is

00:50:32.500 up here but i would i would argue that british colombian sentiment uh separatist sentiment has

00:50:37.820 always been less about separating from canada and more about reconceptualizing the provincial

00:50:42.420 boundaries uh and you've got the whole northeast of the province that probably identifies culturally

00:50:47.160 more with alberta um caribou etc and these kind of things these kind of sort of ignorant developments

00:50:55.220 from the from provincial government of any stripe just exacerbate those frustrations and so when

00:51:00.700 you've got this rising tide of of people discussing you know what might we look like if we reimagine

00:51:07.320 our boundaries well this these are the justifications that come into that so i think

00:51:10.860 it's going to become a live issue. And I'm perfectly honest, I think that conversation

00:51:14.580 is healthy. And part of the reason why I'm, you know, excited about the Western Standard is

00:51:21.360 because it's one of the only organs that really discusses these issues in any real way.

00:51:28.340 To your point, and I appreciate that shout out, of course, we at the Western Standard are always

00:51:33.180 happy to tackle the most nuanced and least nuanced of concepts with people who get cancelled

00:51:38.840 elsewhere it's great but uh the other thing that that kind of comes to mind is that recently there

00:51:43.780 was an announcement out of i believe uh the eastern part of of oregon uh and northeastern

00:51:49.880 part of oregon and washington uh that there's counties there that are attempting to secede

00:51:53.860 from their liberal states and join idaho uh which uh i mean i never i don't ever i don't know if i

00:51:59.860 ever thought i'd see the day where that would happen uh western internal landlock separation

00:52:04.700 sovereignty but nonetheless apparently there are counties in the united states that are feeling

00:52:09.060 rather alienated from their own state makeup and i mean the last u.s election was pretty clear about

00:52:14.160 that uh trump took the counties and biden took the towns and that that was a very interesting

00:52:20.940 point you know the probably the best tweet about it coming out of uh somebody somebody who is

00:52:26.040 following quite closely saying something to the effect of remember there are no blue states only

00:52:29.920 blue cities so for canada and for for the united states and for anybody living in the uh why any

00:52:37.280 you know anybody living in in the rural parts of canada they do feel very alienated they do feel

00:52:41.760 the power center is very far away and how do they how do they get their needs met i think if we lose

00:52:47.760 representation in victoria we're in big trouble up here in the north we're already ignored we're

00:52:53.280 going to be completely completely silenced pretty quick here well you look at the the bent of

00:52:59.440 politicians down there i mean just look at i mean if you think victoria uh has any sense of what's

00:53:04.940 going on in the rest of the province we look at this the municipal council of of victoria i mean

00:53:09.140 it's just a uh i mean it's it's it's like a absurd uh comedy show sort of how that runs and so and

00:53:17.340 you're right to mention that it's it's the old line right first as farce then as then as tragedy

00:53:22.740 i think is the old uh the old line yeah but you're right to mention that this is playing out all over

00:53:28.080 the place, this divide between rural and urban centers, where politicians and power brokers in

00:53:33.760 the urban centers really view the rural areas as just a resource base. We don't have to worry too

00:53:38.660 much about the people that live there because they're just there to do the work and produce

00:53:41.520 wealth for us. Well, I think what we're going to start to see over the next 10, 20 years is,

00:53:48.760 you know, cultural groups of people in those areas start to really coalesce around political

00:53:54.440 coalitions and demand more representation and and to try to find levers to to realize that

00:54:01.920 and that's a positive thing I think all of this discussion about separation or

00:54:07.200 reconceptualizing the provincial boundaries I mean this these are things we should be talking

00:54:11.760 about our country is so young and was so hastily put together there's absolutely no reason why we

00:54:18.740 can't in a very peaceful and civil way talk about you know whether those boundaries still

00:54:24.600 represent reality the economic realities and the cultural realities today um and and so i you know

00:54:32.040 i understand sort of the sentiment of people that are really sort of gung-ho candidate candidate

00:54:35.740 really got to stay the same uh because people really want to be able to identify with a brand

00:54:40.640 but nobody's nobody's talking about blowing away the brand we're just saying look like how do we

00:54:46.460 have civil conversations about whether or not the boundaries still meet our needs anymore i mean it

00:54:50.880 wasn't that difficult to create none of it out of the northwest territories and they really just

00:54:55.280 sort of carved the whole place in half it's not a province of territories but we didn't have to go

00:55:00.260 to war to do that like nobody had to march in uh the military to try to put it put down any

00:55:06.320 separate sentiment it just kind of made sense uh because we got a lot of land up here right and it

00:55:12.120 doesn't necessarily and it was all kind of again it was all sort of hastily put together to you

00:55:17.280 know stop stop the angst from from annexing everything uh and it doesn't necessarily fit

00:55:23.500 and so let's talk about what fits i'm looking forward to that conversation i don't see anybody

00:55:29.760 other than the western standard really having it in a in a way that doesn't try to downplay it and

00:55:34.700 and turn it into some kind of fringe discussion um i think that's how people's develop i think

00:55:40.960 that's i think it's part of part of our cultural and national evolution and i'm i'm looking forward

00:55:45.120 to it and i i love your show for that reason well well thank you and we love having you on the show

00:55:50.560 i mean i'm looking forward to uh pivoting back to uh using diocesan and parish boundaries in order to

00:55:57.920 what uh what canada might look like uh or we could just use watersheds which i think actually our

00:56:02.560 ridings are actually pretty well apportioned for this some of them at least using basically what

00:56:07.040 looks like you know the continental divide in order to decide where these lines are going to

00:56:11.920 be drawn i i don't mind some of that uh making postage stamps in the middle of nowhere i love

00:56:17.760 you saskatch i was born there i love you but uh it doesn't make any sense and we need it's pretty

00:56:24.640 arbitrary but hey more ideas not fewer right let's uh i think we should you know we should

00:56:29.760 we should probably organize uh once covid's over like weekly sessions down at one of the local

00:56:34.400 breweries here and just have people come in and start drawing on napkins about you know what they

00:56:38.080 think things should look like and you know i mean that's the way that's how people do it over a big

00:56:42.560 map of canada we'll just have people doodle on it where they think should go where it'd be great

00:56:47.280 be absolutely great um aaron it's been great having you on this morning uh we're gonna be

00:56:52.240 pivoting here for just a moment uh to bring stewart on if you would like to give us some closing

00:56:56.800 statements we're gonna put you full screen and we're gonna do the runaround thing over here

00:57:00.800 go ahead and say what you'd like to say you guys I'll cover for you during your transition I don't

00:57:07.220 have any closing statements but the one item I didn't get to was just a report that those who

00:57:13.700 haven't been paying that close of attention Kevin Falcon who is a fairly well-known name in British

00:57:18.100 Columbia also announced that he's gonna he's gonna throw his name in for the BC Liberal leadership

00:57:23.100 race that's not a surprise to anyone this is a fellow he was a former cabinet minister he sort

00:57:28.760 rose to prominence in British Columbia before being in MLA a number of over a decade ago in his

00:57:36.700 I think he was involved in the campaign against or on HST. And so he was able to sort of build up

00:57:46.680 his own base. He's probably regarded as sort of the more corporate centered right of the BC

00:57:52.760 Liberal Party, but is probably widely considered a frontrunner. He ran previously and lost very

00:58:00.900 narrowly to Christy Clark during a previous leadership race, and some would argue didn't

00:58:07.960 actually lose to Christy Clark. There were some allegations of impropriety in terms of memberships

00:58:13.380 being fabricated, etc. I don't think anything was ever proven. And of course, whenever you got

00:58:17.820 something like that happen within a party, after the election is done, the party sort of wants to

00:58:21.620 put it away and not talk about it because it just looks bad on the party if it's true

00:58:25.640 in any case a lot of people figured he probably should have won in the first place

00:58:28.860 nobody lamented it too bad because Christy Clark kept winning until she didn't in 2017

00:58:33.560 but you can tell that the NDP is quite concerned about him they regard him as a front runner

00:58:40.080 because they've already launched a diversity-based attack on him and have pulled the old video of

00:58:47.520 Jane Thornthwaite from North Vancouver, uh, making a joke at, uh, about Bowen Ma at Ralph

00:58:54.800 Sultan's retirement, uh, thing that they did over zoom. So that video is making the rounds again,

00:59:00.420 where she sort of described Bowen Ma as having, you know, like tried to manipulate Ralph Sultan,

00:59:05.600 who's like this 90 year old MLA has been around forever. He's the guy incidentally that when

00:59:09.580 Christy Clark lost her riding in, in Vancouver point gray to David Eby, but still wanted to be

00:59:14.280 premier had to go find a place in Kelowna because Ralph Sultan in West Vancouver refused to step

00:59:19.420 down for her, even though he was an advanced. So I've always kind of had a soft spot for him.

00:59:24.440 But anyway, basically what was being suggested by Jane Thornthwaite, for those that don't know,

00:59:34.180 was that Bowen Ma from the NDP was always able to kind of get her way with Ralph because

00:59:38.600 in her words, she was cute and Ralph was susceptible to cute people.

00:59:42.160 And I guess Kevin Falcon laughed at that joke and is the only one who was on the call, and it included Andrew Wilkinson, who hasn't apologized for it.

00:59:55.880 So they're after him over that now, and they'll probably dog that.

00:59:59.860 But we'll see.

01:00:00.440 We'll see how he does.

01:00:03.420 Anyway, if you want to toss me off, I'm happy to go.

01:00:06.240 It's been a delight, and I'm really happy to see Stuart in there with you.

01:00:11.580 Absolutely.

01:00:12.160 Well, thank you so much, Aaron.

01:00:13.420 And again, thank you for running things while we did our scene change.

01:00:16.680 I really appreciate that.

01:00:17.680 We'll see you again next week.

01:00:19.420 You betcha.

01:00:19.780 I'll watch the rest of the show with interest.

01:00:21.200 Take care.

01:00:22.140 All right.

01:00:22.520 Thank you, Aaron.

01:00:24.040 Well, that was Aaron Eckman giving his hot takes.

01:00:27.140 Now we go to our other hot takes guy of the week.

01:00:29.960 That's always Stuart.

01:00:30.860 And he always brings on the best read that we have at the end of the week here.

01:00:35.520 Aaron and Stuart, always a great partnership to have.

01:00:38.260 And now we're going to talk a little bit about, well,

01:00:40.280 everything from redistribution to the kevin falcon question uh where should we start steward

01:00:44.440 well i mean the kevin falcon situation is a pretty interesting one uh is the mic working okay it's

01:00:51.840 working all right we'll just bring it a bit closer to you no problem at all so kevin falcon i think

01:00:57.860 the attack the ndp has chosen really indicates the appalling state of play in bc now kevin falcon

01:01:07.940 has a record he was the young turk of gordon campbell's first government he was made the

01:01:15.660 minister of deregulation and the minister responsible for core review core review was

01:01:23.140 the process whereby the government cut one-third of its services but because it um couldn't uh

01:01:31.720 so there's a one-third core review but also campbell had promised that they wouldn't cut

01:01:36.420 health or education. So what that meant was massive cuts everywhere else, huge cuts that

01:01:42.940 were delivered by Kevin Falcon's ministry. And that resulted, you know, as we know, in Gordon

01:01:49.400 Hogue becoming the new minister of dead kids and all of that. So Kevin Falcon also involved in the

01:01:57.580 B.C. rail sale, when we took that $1.1 billion asset and sold it for 1,000 years for $91 million

01:02:07.240 and two government employees did time for corruption over the sale, these are things

01:02:14.620 that one might lay at the feet of Kevin Falcon. One might also look at his long-term involvement

01:02:20.160 with the taxpayer movement, whom I have a soft spot for. I like Troy Lanigan. I like the

01:02:25.980 neo-Jeffersonians, but the left, in particular the Broadband Institute, has put years into

01:02:32.740 demonizing the taxpayer movement. And we could go with all of Kevin Falcon's connections to them.

01:02:38.800 What do we go with? We don't go with any of that. We go with Falcon, who was not a public figure at

01:02:45.180 the time, laughing at the wrong joke. That's where we are in the discourse. We have the minister of

01:02:53.360 deregulation associated with massive service cuts, a corrupt railway deal. We've got him,

01:03:00.080 he has the whole, you know, Campbell era to wear. And we're saying he hasn't apologized yet for

01:03:09.220 being in a phone call where he laughed at an inappropriate joke. Like, this is all politics

01:03:17.260 is now it's just like it's just like asking the other side to apologize for offending someone

01:03:23.920 all the time like who the hell cares i mean yes offense is a thing but but i want my railway back

01:03:31.760 this guy took my railway away like where where does laughing at the wrong joke somehow become

01:03:38.280 equivalent to a bunch of kids dying in care because there was a 70 cut to the budget like

01:03:45.360 this is just insanity and the worst thing is you don't see bow and ma calling for this

01:03:52.480 bow and ma is fine bow and ma is a friend of mine and i gotta say there's it also shows you how the

01:04:01.280 ndp treats its non-front bench mlas bowen is cast as a victim and we play this victim thing bow and

01:04:14.400 Ma is like, she was pissed off at the joke. She got her apology. She's the minister of

01:04:21.780 infrastructure now. She's a politician of substance. Agree or disagree with her. She 1.00

01:04:28.440 is one of the few people who talks about the burden baby boomers are leaving for the present

01:04:34.300 generation, the burden that my generation is leaving for the present generation. She

01:04:39.160 talks about that stuff on the floor of the legislature. She talks about class on the

01:04:45.120 floor of the legislature, unlike every single other NDP MLA and the challenges faced by working

01:04:50.760 class people. This woman's an engineer. She's a person of substance. And what the NDP, what is 0.98

01:04:56.800 the NDP user for? Standing there at press conferences and being the alleged victim of an

01:05:04.480 attack that wasn't even an attack that happened last year it's um it's really kind of disgraceful

01:05:12.300 uh that this is how the government thinks to attack i mean i i just i do not understand

01:05:20.240 how they think this actually plays like i get how it plays with media i get how like competitive

01:05:27.620 offense taking works really well if you're keith baldry because all you have to do is read twitter

01:05:33.140 that's your that's your work day now but if we're actually talking about real things you know kevin

01:05:40.140 falcon's a serious candidate and i think the contest between kevin falcon and ellis ross is

01:05:45.440 going to be fascinating because we see that there are a bunch of these um less high profile candidates

01:05:54.700 some of whose names i don't even remember but they're coming from the the far right of the

01:06:01.200 party. They're there to represent the party base. And a lot of what's going to happen in this

01:06:05.840 leadership race, it'll be a contest between Falcon and Ross about who can appeal to the base and who

01:06:12.880 can get the votes of those candidates when they're eliminated on the early ballots. Now, Aaron was

01:06:19.280 putting forward some theories about how it was that Christy Clark, the most hated member of the

01:06:23.340 BC Liberal Caucus could win the leadership back in 2011. And yes, some people have argued

01:06:31.500 malfeasance. I'm sure nobody's membership list in Surrey Green Timbers looked quite right.

01:06:38.860 Maybe George Abbott's did, but I don't think Kevin Falcons did. I don't think Christy Clark's did.

01:06:44.900 But the reason that Christy Clark won was she thought clearly about the difference between

01:06:51.980 a leadership race in a provincial election. She went, 40% of these ridings are held by NDP MLAs.

01:07:02.720 There's no local liberal MLA to endorse me there. So I'm pouring all of my campaign machine

01:07:10.920 into the 30-something ridings the NDP hold. And everybody else made their leadership campaign

01:07:18.420 depend on the support of MLAs. MLAs would deliver support from their riding. But with every riding

01:07:25.420 equally weighted, Christy Clark went in with a huge lead because she bothered to campaign

01:07:31.820 in places the liberals don't traditionally win. And that's one of the reasons her leadership was

01:07:37.200 secure, because a huge portion of the people who vote for the BC liberals never see a BC liberal

01:07:44.460 MLA representing them. If you live in Prince Rupert, you've had like one chance to have a

01:07:50.460 right-wing MLA since 1970. You know, so she spoke to the needs of BC liberals in other parts of the 0.98

01:07:59.980 province. And that was smart. And that's what got her the leadership. And that is going to be

01:08:04.960 what will decide the race between Falcon and Ross as well. To go to party members who are ignored

01:08:12.480 and irrelevant a lot of the time, and to sign up party members in ridings that their party doesn't

01:08:18.400 hold. In that way, I think a leadership race is probably the most salutary political contest we

01:08:24.240 have in BC, because in a provincial election, a maximum of one-third of the ridings are in play.

01:08:31.380 In a leadership race, weirdly enough, everybody's voice matters, and that's why so much power has

01:08:37.700 flowed into the office of party leader over time as that system has gone into effect so

01:08:45.260 you know i'm interested in the race i'm very interested in kevin falcon rebranding himself

01:08:52.560 as a center right guy yeah um you know that's new i mean he's got the right look for it he

01:08:59.840 doesn't look like a guy i'm peter mckay look at me yeah because that went well for peter mckay

01:09:05.880 so well times uh yeah don't try to be peter mckay kevin falcon do photo ops with troy lanagan

01:09:12.920 get people angry with you like that's that's your path um ellis ross is going to do some

01:09:19.720 really interesting organizing it's going to be very interesting to see whether um you know

01:09:26.520 south asian people are very willing to cross party lines to put a south asian person in office right

01:09:31.840 if you're the South Asian candidate in a leadership race, you can count on South Asian

01:09:36.700 people of all extractions getting behind you. If you're black, same thing. Everybody joined to 0.71

01:09:43.560 back Howard McCurdy and Rosemary Brown back in the day. Of course, we don't have the black 1.00

01:09:48.960 organizations we used to. We now have a lot of national organizations for different countries

01:09:54.360 that African Canadians come from. Chinese people, not so much. They stick with their party pretty

01:10:01.820 much through thick and thin there isn't a high level of investment in seeing an east asian leader

01:10:07.820 the way there is a south asian leader we have no precedent to go from as to how many people will

01:10:16.380 mobilize to see an indigenous premier how many indigenous people will join a party or will cross

01:10:22.780 party lines to do it i think that um you know ellis ross isn't my ideology isn't my party

01:10:30.380 is associated with the project I most oppose of all projects in British Columbia. But I think he

01:10:37.140 represents a really exciting time for indigenous politics in BC. I'm really glad to see him doing

01:10:45.940 what he's doing, regardless of where he sits on certain issues, because I think it'll also give

01:10:51.980 a lot of indigenous people who are on the political right, an opportunity to stand up and say,

01:10:57.340 the fact that i'm indigenous doesn't mean that progressives can take me for granted

01:11:01.360 uh and and that's something that i'll be glad to see in the race but i'll also be surprised

01:11:08.920 if these are the last two mainstream candidates no that's fair i i think that's fair as well

01:11:14.900 maybe something that would be a model for what happens with ellis ross is uh well it isn't there

01:11:20.740 is wab canoe still involved with the ndp in manitoba is he still in charge or has he been

01:11:26.060 ousted well what can you got in a very different way and we didn't um uh so can you did fight a

01:11:35.480 conventional leadership race he was not successful at producing a solid indigenous vote that's not

01:11:43.940 how he got in his vote was very much a winnipeg versus the rest of manitoba vote steve ashton

01:11:51.940 probably went into that convention with more rural indigenous support than Wab Kanu did.

01:11:58.640 Wab Kanu had a juggernaut in terms of urban indigenous support, which is huge. It's the

01:12:03.560 north end of Winnipeg. But he didn't impress on reserve people. They stuck with Steve Ashton,

01:12:12.420 who had been their man since the previous leadership race. And so, I mean, I think it's

01:12:20.880 exciting to see web canoe where he is. I think he's got a, I think in terms of like having a

01:12:28.400 checkered past and just weathering the attacks for that, he's done some really important things

01:12:35.200 in Canadian politics. He's shown that just because you've done some really bad stuff doesn't mean

01:12:39.720 you're out forever. So I think that leadership race has shown some important things, but it sure

01:12:47.800 didn't show indigenous people in manitoba as a whole uh becoming excited about doing ndp politics

01:12:56.340 so we have this this opportunity here to observe in british columbia in real time the the joint

01:13:03.260 that the the joining of the already the agitation that happens in indigenous populations first

01:13:09.260 nations populations when it comes to projects when it comes to protests and then the possible

01:13:13.140 that coupling it to an actual political campaign that could result in a premiership. That would be

01:13:18.320 very interesting to see. But is that directly in opposition to, because of the ideological

01:13:24.140 differences, is that going to run afoul of it? Is it the ideological differences between the

01:13:28.760 pro-development and anti-development versus, of course, Ellis Ross's position on development?

01:13:35.000 Well, the great thing is it's a liberal leadership race. So there will be no anti-development

01:13:40.640 candidate for those votes to go to the question is are indigenous people who oppose cgl who oppose

01:13:49.040 uh kinemat lng who oppose wood fiber lng are they going to sit on their hands or are they going to

01:13:56.560 sign up because it's also important to have an indigenous premier irrespective of these other

01:14:02.880 things right it's um and you know i'm not a big fan of that idea per se i think people govern

01:14:11.120 based on who they owe they don't govern based on what identity group they were born into

01:14:17.120 right you get into office representing certain people because you owe them for their votes or

01:14:22.180 their money that's who's that and that is but i think in the case of ellis ross um

01:14:28.960 anti or at least people who favor different forms of development um there are ways that

01:14:39.200 he could bring them on side right he doesn't have to oppose cgl or lng canada um he could

01:14:47.480 for instance take a position on um on uh old growth on fairy creek he could listen to his

01:14:54.100 caucus colleague mike morris about the use of glyphosate you know they're gordon one of the

01:15:00.560 things gordon campbell did every election he ran in was he always tossed a bone to environmentalists

01:15:07.420 every single time gordon campbell's the reason we don't have the commando completion project

01:15:12.800 because the ndp was going to lose too many of their votes to campbell in 96 and so at the last

01:15:20.020 minute, they canceled the Comando expansion for Rio Tinto, Alcan. And that's because of a position

01:15:27.940 Gordon Campbell took. People remember his carbon tax, but you could rely on him like clockwork.

01:15:33.820 Here's the bone I'm throwing the environmentalists. If Ellis Ross goes back to doing that kind of

01:15:38.580 politics, then folks can unapologetically say, hey, I got involved in this leadership race.

01:15:44.380 we've moved the liberals on this issue and this issue, and they matter. So some of it also has

01:15:50.540 to do with knowing how to do a certain kind of transactional politics. And a lot of people,

01:15:57.980 right, they see environmental activists as being people who are impossible to negotiate with.

01:16:08.180 And there are some ways in which you can't negotiate certain things away. If something

01:16:12.120 is really unpopular it doesn't matter what group you make a deal with some other group will

01:16:16.300 represent the people opposed to it but environmentalists are mostly pushovers at

01:16:21.820 negotiating tables right they they uh they really like if you remember the commission on resources

01:16:28.460 and environment from 93 they signed off on all kinds of new things we didn't even have before

01:16:35.100 i remember the east kootenai core table created dedicated use crown land for coal mining only

01:16:42.020 that was not a thing that existed before who did that well a bunch of environmentalists signed a

01:16:47.380 deal with um um the coal lobby because the coal lobby is really good at crying at meetings so you

01:16:54.500 know if you stage a little pity party at a meeting you can get a deal out of an environmental group

01:16:59.620 pretty easily you know think about my yacht yes so uh and i mean so i i think that um i think that

01:17:09.220 that people mistakenly assume there are no deals to be made uh and i think that's that's a mistake

01:17:16.720 i think if ellis ross has a clear head um he can go places uh that falcon can't um because he'll

01:17:24.900 also problematic as it is get a free pass for his indigeneity from groups that would otherwise

01:17:32.580 grill the hell out of a vc liberal no that's fair that's fair um though he did you know he him and

01:17:39.000 pan palmetto on that one ctv and they really did duke it up that was some good tv it was like the

01:17:43.640 best tv we'd had in canada in years yeah is this the bbc have they taken over ctv for the day

01:17:50.340 no that was uh that was good stuff now i also um as we're talking about this other stuff i was

01:17:57.120 listening to the tail end of your uh your interview with aaron sure um interested in the

01:18:03.200 redistribution file because this will actually interact with the liberal leadership race

01:18:08.500 Absolutely. Because they work on a point system assigned by by riding. So if depending upon when redistribution closes and when their leadership race closes, these processes might overlap and magnify certain votes and reduce the value of other votes.

01:18:29.140 That's right. So now I don't take quite the hard position Aaron does on redistribution. I don't think the Supreme Court basically said your riding map should be rep by pop plus or minus 25%. There's your wriggle room 25%. You can go over our average population by 25% or under it.

01:18:53.460 the current writing map is not a result of rationally applying the principles that the

01:19:02.240 court laid down in 1988 for how to redistribute it is a hodgepodge of crap the current map that's

01:19:10.780 that's what it is just just utter flaming garbage uh it's nonsense there are a whole bunch of really

01:19:18.540 low population rural ridings that are tit for tat trades between the bc liberals and bc ndp

01:19:26.860 collusion so there are so it's like well we'll vote for peace river south to be 60 below the

01:19:34.860 average uh in exchange for sticking being 60 below the average so there are certain special ridings

01:19:43.420 that are crazy small. And I love the people of Dawson Creek. I love the people of Smithers.

01:19:51.040 But no, their votes shouldn't be worth twice as much as my vote here in Prince George North.

01:19:57.380 That makes no sense. The fact that somebody's vote in McKenzie is worth half the vote of somebody

01:20:08.020 on the other side of pine pass that makes no sense uh what the original map if you go back

01:20:18.100 and look at the first set of boundaries we got after the dixon court judgment in 1989

01:20:24.260 we managed to represent rural and northern bc very well and we managed to not violate that

01:20:32.180 rep by pop plus or minus 25 percent uh and the way we did that was by looking at the whole north

01:20:44.020 and saying well we're gonna need to have lower population writings let's have the whole north

01:20:49.700 deviate by 20 percent less and so at the time the number was 50 000 so it was like so you can um

01:20:58.820 um, uh, I guess, no, it was 40, it was 40,000. The lowest population riding was the old

01:21:05.860 Buckley Valley Stikine at 29,000 people. The highest population riding had like 50,000 people

01:21:11.940 in Vancouver. And that simply using that variation across the board throughout a region,

01:21:18.660 rather than arbitrarily for some communities and not others, the North does not need to

01:21:24.300 lose representation. The coast doesn't need to gain representation. What we have to do is

01:21:30.440 responsibly apply the Constitution in a way that is not unreasonable. But I'll tell you the real

01:21:38.580 cheat in this map, the reason the Lower Mainland is so overrepresented, it's not the whole Lower

01:21:44.940 mainland either. It is Surrey. There's Surrey and the Comox Valley are the two examples of the

01:21:55.540 biggest representation failures. And you want to know why they're so overrepresented? It's because

01:22:01.800 with no reference to the original court judgment, with no reference to the Constitution,

01:22:07.820 boundaries commission started adding a criterion for how big your riding should be which is called

01:22:16.700 shelf life so if you're a municipal council and you go to the electoral boundaries commission

01:22:23.440 and you say we've got this crazy development plan we're going to double our population in 10 years

01:22:29.360 that makes sense twice as many ridings that makes total sense right i mean we could totally sell

01:22:35.680 shares and things that don't exist yet. Yes. So a bunch of your writing map is promises

01:22:41.300 municipal governments made in order to get more seats. And that's got to go. First of all,

01:22:50.080 I'm an environmentalist. So like trying to make your municipality grow faster. Like,

01:22:56.040 so why are you favoring a rapid growth policy over a slow growth policy or a no growth policy?

01:23:04.380 you're basically saying pro-developer municipal councils deserve more legislative seats than

01:23:12.780 municipal councils that are conservative about development. So you create this environment where

01:23:19.500 municipalities prepare for the boundaries commission by making anti-environmental housing

01:23:27.320 policies. And that's a perverse incentive. It's got to go. You should get represented for the

01:23:34.480 population that is in your riding at the time the commission comes through your riding.

01:23:42.060 So Prince George, ironically, we have some of the worst representations, certainly by far the worst

01:23:47.460 in the north, among the worst in the interior. Why? Because our city council, as much as they're

01:23:55.540 like good booster types, don't go in there and convince the provincial government we're going

01:24:01.020 to have 100,000 people in Prince George within five years. They don't play that game. And so

01:24:07.440 Prince George ends up getting less representation than a place like Comox. And that's unreasonable.

01:24:16.560 It also ironically hurts downtown. It doesn't hurt downtown Vancouver, but it hurts most of

01:24:21.520 Vancouver, and Victoria. On average, Vancouverites have 20% less voting power per capita than people

01:24:28.480 in Surrey. On average, people in Nanaimo have 20% less voting power than people in Courtney.

01:24:35.240 This sort of thing has got to go. The commission needs to go back to the original principles on

01:24:42.100 which we were to redistribute. And then we wouldn't find ourselves in the North having to make

01:24:47.280 unconstitutional arguments or arguments that we're special, special people who deserve so

01:24:53.800 much more voting power per capita. You know, I may not agree with Vancouverites on a lot of issues,

01:25:00.140 but I don't think my vote should be worth more than theirs just because I moved up here.

01:25:05.540 So I'm hoping we can have like a real conversation for redistribution. One of the crazy things about

01:25:13.720 redistribution is that in america right redistribution is an industry it's an industry

01:25:21.640 yeah it's huge and political parties understand that a decision by a boundaries commission

01:25:29.140 determining the boundaries of a riding is the difference between success and failure it's a

01:25:34.660 difference between winning and losing and so political parties and citizens groups get invested

01:25:42.340 They all get out there. They all fight. Sometimes they're biased processes. Here, our process is technically nonpartisan. We all know it's actually partisan, but it's soft partisan.

01:25:54.860 And what I have done in the past, and what I'm really going to work on doing this time, is letting people know that this is their process, that everybody can appear before the Boundaries Commission, everybody should appear before the Boundaries Commission, if they have an opinion about what communities their votes should be pooled with and which communities they shouldn't be pooled with.

01:26:21.540 There were all kinds of questions before the Boundaries Commission, and they're important questions for us, right? We're, you know, we're out here on the West Yellowhead towards Vanderhoof. What about the idea of reincorporating Vanderhoof into one of the Prince George writings?

01:26:40.000 We used to have three Prince George writings, and one of them contained Vanderhoof, and that produced a different kind of representation for folks along Highway 16.

01:26:53.000 So there are a lot of really practical questions, but generally, when you go to a Boundaries Commission hearing, very few people are there.

01:27:01.240 People don't understand it's a truly open process. And whoever schemes most effectively to get people out often wins the day. The reason Nathan Cullen exists politically is because of work that I organized with the current MLA for North Coast, Jennifer Rice, to save the federal riding of Skeena, because it was one of the few rural ridings the NDP could win.

01:27:31.240 And we got people out to hearings in Kitaman, Prince Rupert, and on Haida Gwaii. We engaged all kinds of community groups, and the result was the Boundaries Commission tore up its first draft and restored some representation in its second draft.

01:27:46.900 so uh i'm really hoping this is a great way of doing cross-partisan organizing also with folks

01:27:54.980 who are sovereigntists or the like everybody in northern bc has got an interest in getting

01:28:02.060 shelf life taken off the table in getting the writings within northern bc more equal

01:28:07.820 uh and in getting the process more transparent so um that's not a right left thing no one of the

01:28:15.960 things i'd actually like to ask you about steward is a historical question here why why do we have

01:28:20.740 unicameral systems in our provinces what happened to our provincial senates why don't we have a

01:28:25.280 provincial senate in bc wouldn't that make more sense maybe than to try and have a another regional

01:28:30.180 representation system i'm not a i'm not a fan of bicameral systems because i'm not a small

01:28:36.020 government guy uh so i know why every small government advocate likes bicameral systems

01:28:43.020 There are double the opportunities to stop a law from being passed.

01:28:49.200 But I think that constitutionally you wouldn't even be able to get the thing you want out of a provincial Senate.

01:28:58.900 I think the Supreme Court would intervene and force you to roughly equalize the populations of the Senate seats just like the House seats.

01:29:06.980 I think that's, even if we'd brought that back after 1982, I think the charter would effectively nerf that provision.

01:29:19.440 But I do think that, I mean, I did support single transferable vote twice.

01:29:26.300 That is a good way of doing regional representation, where you have ridings that are about the size of our federal ridings rather than our provincial ridings,

01:29:35.840 but they have three MLAs apiece allocated proportionally. So like if that had happened

01:29:42.840 in the last provincial election, the Peace River and Parsnip would have three MLAs. One would be

01:29:49.720 a Tory and two would be liberals, right? You'd see the House sound writing. There'd be a Green,

01:29:57.500 a New Democrat, and a Liberal. So I think there are ways of doing regional politics. We had one

01:30:03.680 on the table. And it's entirely the fault of the people who managed the 2009 campaign that we don't

01:30:10.900 have it. I'm one of those people. I really should have fought harder in the internal politics of

01:30:18.120 that campaign while it came up with a losing strategy. You know, I know that there are some

01:30:25.020 people who are saying, well, we could use the notwithstanding clause. And maybe we could use

01:30:31.220 the notwithstanding clause. But my feeling is if you can deliver an objective without violating

01:30:36.560 people's charter rights, you should always do it that way. Probably a better way of doing it.

01:30:42.960 Let's pivot a little bit then to the announcement that came out of Kitimat, well, out of the

01:30:48.460 headquarters of Woodland. No, the Chevron and the other guy who's the two guys who are doing

01:30:57.540 the kitamat lng why is his name escaping me again the big company doesn't matter the point is that

01:31:02.720 they might pull out a kitamat um oh this is but this is kitamat lng not lng canada no no no this

01:31:09.240 is kitamat lng yeah well you know thank goodness i that's all i got really um i i'm sorry i just

01:31:19.600 i look i know there are some people who are watching this who say that they don't believe

01:31:26.000 there is a climate emergency that they don't believe the climate science um i used to entertain

01:31:32.680 those arguments a little more i think we all know that what we learned in grade five science is still

01:31:38.140 true um carbon is a great insulator you put methane and co2 in the atmosphere it's going to

01:31:44.420 insulate we used to call it the greenhouse effect and we all know that that's what methane and co2

01:31:49.820 and these other gases do. I think that people can say, well, it might produce perverse effects

01:31:57.660 in global cooling. Yeah, it might, but it hasn't. So the question is, even if you're a climate

01:32:07.180 skeptic, are you that sure? Because if you think there's even a 16% chance that people like me are

01:32:17.220 right and we are frying the planet, if you think that's a 16% chance is okay, then start doing

01:32:25.500 Russian roulette recreationally because that's also a 16% chance game. So even a 16% risk is a

01:32:33.680 little bit too big of a risk for somebody who's not a psycho. So I just got to say, look, I know

01:32:40.160 it's really unfair that people who are like totally detached from the actual losses people

01:32:49.720 will experience by shutting down petroleum extraction things like that that these smug

01:32:55.640 bastards are right and that good people working um raising families doing stuff it sucks that

01:33:06.520 some people's jobs are tied to something that is going to take us down. It sucks. It's not fair.

01:33:13.580 It's not fair that social movements that I can barely tolerate are the ones that I think are

01:33:21.140 correct. Environmentalists don't like me. They never have. But it doesn't stop me believing

01:33:26.920 that climate change is real and consequential. And I think that we've just gotten a little bit

01:33:32.640 too tribal over this. Like, I've been screwed enough different ways by environmentalists in

01:33:39.100 my life. I am filled with resentment. Like, if hippies were an ethnicity, I would be a racist.

01:33:45.000 I, I, I've really gone down that road. But I just, I just say, look, we, what we need 0.99

01:33:55.800 are governments that both recognize the climate emergency and are going to share the losses a

01:34:02.560 associated with it equitably. And that's what we don't have right now. It's really interesting

01:34:08.400 that looking at how Bernie Sanders did in West Virginia, in coal country, it's his best territory,

01:34:17.000 shows up in a town, people are dirt poor, the only industry in the town is the mine,

01:34:22.920 and Sanders goes, shut down the mine, and everybody goes, yeah! What's that about?

01:34:27.560 the only difference between Bernie Sanders and Naomi Klein saying shut down the mine

01:34:33.340 is that people trust Bernie Sanders. People know that he cares about their jobs and their families

01:34:40.020 and their communities. And they know that if he were in power, the losses associated with

01:34:47.560 getting off coal and oil would be shared and shared equitably. Now, Avi Lewis, Naomi Klein's

01:34:57.300 partner, right, has just announced as a federal NDP candidate. In a riding, he has no risk of

01:35:03.100 winning. Let's be clear there. But if Abby Lewis made the same pitch in a coal town in BC,

01:35:11.600 or in, you know, in Elkford or Fernie, he'd get nowhere. People would look at the guy and they'd

01:35:19.100 go, why don't trust this guy? This, if coal is shut down, it's going to be on our backs.

01:35:25.180 we'll have nothing our communities will be destroyed and these smug bastards will walk

01:35:30.380 off with a sack of cash uh and at this point there's such alienation between people who want

01:35:41.060 a response on climate and people who are living in resource dependent communities there's way

01:35:46.160 more alienation than there was 30 years ago when i was the leader of the green party right

01:35:50.860 i i campaigned in these towns i showed up in these places i remember people were impressed

01:35:57.260 when i went to mckenzie that was like but but that's the point if you and so i guess my position

01:36:05.500 is i'm we dodged a bullet if um this other lng project doesn't go into effect um lng is an

01:36:15.580 industry that will make us into more and more of a pariah state over time and it is um and given the

01:36:24.860 incredible diversity of resources in this province um we're not a one trick pony we're not north

01:36:32.220 dakota we're not equatorial guinea fossil fuels are not our only resource we have a diverse enough

01:36:39.980 ecology that if we cared about industrializing our province at actually building bc manufacturing

01:36:48.940 uh fossil fuels are a drop in the bucket and right now they're the most expensive job that

01:36:53.900 government subsidizes and that can only go on for so long if we subsidized any other sector

01:37:01.020 of the economy like we subsidized fossil fuels we would have a luxurious state supported tourism

01:37:08.620 industry. We'd probably have state-run hotels all over the place with free room service or

01:37:15.260 something. It'd be crazy. And we know that that part of our economy is growing. But the main thing

01:37:23.560 is we need industrial work. There are people in industrial work. They need to stay in industrial

01:37:30.560 work. And the way to do that is to build manufacturing, not to produce short-term

01:37:36.520 pipeline jobs where you're shipping your resource overseas yet again in an unprocessed state

01:37:44.920 very fair very fair and i think that's something else that you can talk about there a little bit

01:37:51.700 it's because it all ties in with the redistribution it ties with the subsidy point you're making

01:37:55.400 because i think in a lot of ways chevron is just saber rattling because i want some money

01:37:59.420 they want to be supported in their time waiting in the wings i we need to talk more about how

01:38:06.360 how are we going to build an economy that is more locally based?

01:38:09.680 The redistribution is a big point here, too.

01:38:11.520 It's like, well, they want to silence our voice.

01:38:13.360 Well, our voice, like, what about how we're going to build our society?

01:38:16.940 How we're going to get things better for ourselves?

01:38:19.800 Well, redistribution is only part of the case.

01:38:23.280 It's about what policies come from Victoria.

01:38:26.300 What I think we need far more than better MLAs or more diverse MLAs,

01:38:32.800 what we need is local control of resources.

01:38:36.360 Look, I, you know, people worry that folks in Vancouver are interested in stopping projects.

01:38:44.880 Folks in Vancouver don't know what projects are going on.

01:38:47.680 They're interested in having conversation, stopping conversations about projects, right?

01:38:52.860 They're interested in like whether somebody offended Bowen Ma in a phone call last year.

01:38:58.600 um that's so the provincial legislature i would far rather fight um a plastics plant i'd far

01:39:07.540 rather fight a pipeline um where a decision was being made at a local level even if i was a

01:39:13.440 minority uh because i'd be making that decision with my neighbors rather than uh taking that

01:39:20.400 fight to victoria this province needs land reform it needs decentralization of decision making to

01:39:29.200 local government about forestry about fishing about agriculture about things like that we

01:39:36.400 have got city councils that don't cover most of the area it's regional district boards that cover

01:39:42.800 most of the problems and they are given nothing to do right their job is to keep taxes lower than

01:39:49.040 the people in the core municipality in the center of the regional district like that's it

01:39:53.280 it's just slightly under service their constituents so as to deliver slightly lower taxes

01:39:58.800 uh all kinds of things and you talk about watersheds right one of the nice things is

01:40:04.960 you don't regional districts don't need equal populations right because they're not they're

01:40:10.560 having their votes pooled so we can have much more watershed based boundaries which is an old

01:40:17.600 thing the greens used to hawk back in the day greens used to be big proponents of decentralization

01:40:25.360 you want to talk about why the green vote keeps going down in northern bc it's because no one

01:40:30.800 in the party can even remember that that's what they used to campaign on community forestry and

01:40:37.120 the like so uh i think that what rural bc needs more than a good set of electoral boundaries

01:40:48.560 is a sincere plan for land reform and regulatory decentralization and we get those things we're

01:40:58.880 going to get less annoyed by victoria and vancouver because they'll be less relevant in our lives

01:41:04.400 And also, once you start looking, if you actually decentralize power at a regional level, the fiction that cities are what makes money starts to disappear.

01:41:21.740 when you know like today you have a lot of folks going well we should just move to a knowledge

01:41:28.100 economy where money is created by cash registers you know like that's effectively what they're

01:41:32.960 saying you know it's just blah knowledge economy blah blah blah and then you realize they just

01:41:37.820 think that a cash register in a store is what makes money or a cash you know or you know an

01:41:44.080 online credit card payment is what makes money that it's totally detached from a physical reality

01:41:50.020 of the fact that we're still buying things made out of stuff and uh i think that could be really

01:41:56.660 clarifying it would be great to see a different green party uh running on a bioregionalist ticket

01:42:05.220 talking about meeting local food needs you know one of the um things about bc agriculture like bc

01:42:12.980 agriculture is tough as nails right it is hammered by supply management in the dairy sector

01:42:20.040 uh you know to keep new brunswick in the federation and it's also hammered by the fact that

01:42:27.860 all kinds of federal and provincial agricultural subsidies exist for farms in alberta saskatchewan

01:42:35.200 manitoba and ontario and not here we end up having interprovincial trade barriers just to protect

01:42:42.600 the little agriculture we have here from the massive subsidies to agriculture that are taking

01:42:49.000 place in the rest of the west so again if we start thinking local and planning local for food and the

01:42:58.600 like we would see a very different thing and that's going to be upsetting it's going to be a thing that

01:43:04.040 we'd have to fight for which is my last point whenever we talk about what is it going to take

01:43:09.960 for us to be independent for us to be self-reliant more even than a policy vision

01:43:18.040 it takes courage that's what it takes because the people who are taking our raw materials for

01:43:25.320 nothing or rather in the case of you know uh royal dutch show the people were basically

01:43:32.600 paying to take our resources away, those people are going to be furious and they will try and

01:43:41.160 hammer us really hard and we have to stand our ground. There are a lot of folks who think that

01:43:47.640 this is about standing up to Ottawa. Ottawa is the least scary thing that's going to be mad at us

01:43:53.220 if we start processing our resources here. This will involve real confrontations with

01:43:59.580 transnational capital. It'll require real capital strikes. And there isn't some deal you can make

01:44:07.640 with the billionaire class to let you get out from under their thumb. That's not how the world works.

01:44:14.220 You don't make that deal. You have to brazen it out. You have to take some hits. You have to go

01:44:19.120 through a short-term recession. And this gets back to that question of trust. People in rural

01:44:26.980 British Columbia don't trust urban British Columbian elites to look after them when the

01:44:32.660 hammer comes down, to pool their resources, to share the losses, to share those short-term losses.

01:44:39.780 And so quite reasonably, they're not authorizing those politicians to take those risks because

01:44:45.960 it's very reasonable to not trust them. And further to that, it's not just reasonable to

01:44:52.540 not trust them it who who who are you going to trust when things go sideways and how is that

01:44:58.740 economy if no one's articulating that vision and gaining the trust of people we don't they they

01:45:03.760 feel like it feels like the vancouver vancouverite elites they don't like they really would sell us

01:45:09.140 down the river you know and their own grandmother for an extra buck well that's right i mean i was

01:45:14.860 i was there when i was invited to the the celebration of the signing of the horgan weaver

01:45:20.920 deal in 2017 and the ndp had run against kinder morgan uh they'd run against you know to the

01:45:31.480 transmountain pipeline they'd run against the enbridge pipeline and i was sitting next to a

01:45:38.240 person who'd go on to be john horgan's communications director and she said you know

01:45:45.040 my one big regret about this deal is that we have to keep our promise on Kinder Morgan.

01:45:53.440 And you're like, what?

01:45:57.900 Hello?

01:45:58.860 So you were planning to betray people the whole time.

01:46:03.700 Just the carpet ripped out from under you.

01:46:06.240 Inconvenience that you're going to have to implement one of your policies.

01:46:11.000 And yeah, for me, that said it all, right?

01:46:13.620 We've all got seen that photo of John Horgan holding the protest sign saying Site C sucks.

01:46:20.340 You know, whether you support Site C or not, whether you support Trans Mountain or not, these guys prove they're untrustworthy in the handling of those issues.

01:46:30.040 They prove that if they'll sell their base out, what hope do people who aren't their base have?

01:46:37.880 And again, we watched that replay with the old growth strategy.

01:46:42.060 This is just, this gets back also to my, you know, environmentalists being chumps.

01:46:47.800 So the, so Horrigan, to placate, Horrigan increased old growth logging as soon as he

01:46:54.700 got into office, and he increased raw log exports, even though he'd promised to bring

01:46:58.740 back a pertinence legislation to stop raw log exports, and then he increased them.

01:47:04.300 And so environmentalists got all mad, and they went, you know, we need, we need like

01:47:08.700 an audit of how much old growth in the province is left.

01:47:12.060 so the government did that and they're totally shocked that the government is using the audit

01:47:18.220 to prioritize the removal of the last of the old growth now that we know where it is we can go get

01:47:23.500 it that is so old growth logging increased again because of this audit environmentalists are

01:47:29.740 notorious for making process promises where they go yeah if you would promise to consult these

01:47:35.340 experts then um then then that's fine and they do consult the expert and the expert goes no don't

01:47:40.780 do that and then they go and do it anyway and they've kept their promise uh nobody said they'd

01:47:45.340 obey the expert just so they'd have a conversation with them it reminds me of my dear friend george

01:47:52.380 jubot who i met at the second round of electoral boundaries commission hearings back in the late

01:47:58.860 90s uh he he and i think were the only presenters to that particular hearing but george long time

01:48:06.860 longtime tory organizer social credit director of research blah blah blah and um george is talking

01:48:14.780 i was asking him late 90s about this guy david turner who had been the mayor of victoria he'd

01:48:19.980 been the last ndp mayor of victoria i said to it's like george i'm having some trouble making

01:48:26.140 a deal with david turner i don't really know what to think of the guy and george says well you know

01:48:31.340 we conservatives were we were very worried when david turner became mayor we thought he was going

01:48:37.580 to ruin the city but it turned out he just wanted to have meetings about ruining the city and uh

01:48:45.820 i think that that's um that's the other thing if you if you um you know when i was briefly running

01:48:53.260 that party the eco-socialists i thought oh good well ask all these frontline workers what to do

01:48:58.620 about poverty in the downtown east side but the people who are working in you know the poverty

01:49:05.820 industry down there i get this list of demands and it's like well we should consult this group

01:49:10.460 of people about this and we should consult this and i kept looking for policy there was no policy

01:49:16.940 consultation has become the thing that vancouver does vancouver just has a lot of folding chairs

01:49:23.340 and a lot of finger sandwiches and they hand them out at these meetings and they write things on

01:49:27.580 whiteboards and they pretend they're doing politics but this is completely disconnected

01:49:32.700 from any physical reality or any policy outcomes and then you wrote a blog about this discussing

01:49:39.020 discussing heaven right the order of heaven yes well that's that's how political parties were

01:49:44.460 they're the worst like i cannot believe all this to do there was about so first of all talk about

01:49:53.100 some bad timing it was sure dumb to tell nikki ashton not to meet with jeremy corbin about

01:50:00.180 palestine uh at the time that the ndp was doing that right but they had this big contest at their

01:50:07.620 national convention right it was like the it was like erin o'toole's climate change resolution

01:50:13.440 the membership rose up and it passed a resolution to support

01:50:18.160 the palestinian people that's not going to make it into the platform and if they just put it in

01:50:28.920 the platform for the hell of it i don't know why they would uh being the ndp it's certainly not 0.90

01:50:35.460 going to make it into public policy but people go to these conventions they have all these votes

01:50:40.520 and yeah my conclusion ultimately was that these votes you hold at political party conventions

01:50:48.200 they're not votes about what governments will do or should do none of those votes have affected

01:50:53.920 government policy in 30 years the only thing those votes do is it's like a it's like you're

01:51:01.540 at a synod and or a church council and you're describing the dimensions of heaven like is the

01:51:10.240 new jerusalem where the part of the new jerusalem so that's paid with paved with chalcedony is that

01:51:16.620 like an uh is that like a green turquoise or is that a blue turquoise like that's what's going on

01:51:22.380 on the floor of your average political convention and some people love that i guess because they

01:51:27.600 don't get enough attention in their lives i i remember being at this this meeting of a coalition

01:51:32.980 of progressive electors and finally after about 20 minutes i said to the chair did you just call

01:51:37.720 this meeting because you're lonely now that would never happen on the right as he looks over at his

01:51:45.960 producer how many email meetings meetings that should have been emails have you been in this

01:51:51.780 week um good lord well you can't tell this much truth in one session steward we're going to get

01:51:59.560 canceled oh no no the great thing is we're already canceled that's why we're here that's why that is

01:52:06.060 why we're here i gained another uh it's so funny whenever the people who are trying to tell people

01:52:14.320 to shun me take another run at me i always get these huge lumps of twitter followers people are

01:52:20.420 sure thrilled to follow canceled people uh i was um apparently the folks who don't like me are now

01:52:31.420 tracking my individual likes on twitter so i do these people have nothing better to do

01:52:37.960 well this is the thing this is the thing like come on the weather's nice get out there get

01:52:44.560 out there in the weather do that you'll feel better but uh yeah i think but i think one of

01:52:52.360 the reasons we have all these meetings on in parts of the political spectrum let me assure you

01:52:59.720 federal liberals are trying to have as few meetings as possible right now because they're

01:53:04.040 in charge and people in the federal liberal party have lots of opportunities to exercise power like

01:53:12.180 by meeting with members of the government like making consequential decisions you get all these

01:53:20.620 extra meetings and these pointless meetings because for people who are outside of the mainstream

01:53:27.640 none of the levers they're pulling are connected to anything no so they can't make decisions about

01:53:33.760 public policy they can't make decisions about government they can't make substantive economic

01:53:38.660 decisions affecting their lives and so they make pointless decisions about who is and is not in

01:53:45.280 their group and what they're going to not do when they get into office finally that's that becomes

01:53:52.100 a life because it's standing in. And here we'll get directly into heresy. I had this epiphany

01:54:01.540 about this, reading about the rise of the Eucharist as a ritual. And the Eucharist emerges

01:54:09.900 out of despair in Paul's movement that Jesus isn't coming back right away.

01:54:17.660 so then they go and they look at the text and they go all right wine and pancakes this is what

01:54:23.220 we're doing now um but the reason that the real presence becomes important in in the bread

01:54:31.700 is because jesus isn't there and this is a substitute for him so there's an enact there's

01:54:40.060 a metaphorical enactment of a physical thing you're missing and that is what meetings are

01:54:47.060 like on outside of the mainstream. We are enacting a fake legislature because we miss

01:54:55.360 access to the real one. And so in that way, people are fulfilling a very basic psychological

01:55:01.360 human need, a need for community, a need for control. But because they're cut off from actual

01:55:09.760 avenues of community and control, you get this kind of farcical engagement with decision making

01:55:22.300 that, of course, also helps to pacify and infantilize people. So when they're put near

01:55:29.440 actual power, they don't know what to do with it. No, that's fair. That's fair. I think that maybe

01:55:35.080 the one thing that's coming to my mind is that there's that postmodern concept of absence that

01:55:40.660 the stop sign is there in the absence of the officer to stop you right and so but if you have

01:55:46.120 a world full of stop signs and no policemen then what are you really doing and at what point do

01:55:50.520 people just start blowing through stop signs well that's a fascinating question right irene silver

01:55:56.880 Black calls that phenomenon, that power of the state, the way you internalize the state so that

01:56:05.620 you are your own policeman, that's part of this larger thing that Irene Silver Black calls state

01:56:12.040 magic. And so that when you go to that wicket and you look at the government employee, you don't see

01:56:21.380 the baby vomit on the collar. You don't see the mismatched buttons. You see the state.

01:56:27.740 And in all of it, it's like infallible majesty. And you're surprised every time your driver's

01:56:33.740 license gets lost in the mail. Every time. You're always surprised when the government doesn't call

01:56:38.620 you back. You're always surprised when the government miscalculates something about it.

01:56:42.580 You're surprised every time because your mind, you're interacting with the ideal of the state,

01:56:49.820 not the shambles of a reality that it is. But the problem is that that magical belief

01:56:57.320 makes us, like that's the only thing Canadians have going for us, is that our state magic is

01:57:03.820 more powerful than anyone else's. We are the most internalized law enforcers. We require the fewest

01:57:12.360 enforcement officers. We're full of state magic. It turns out that believing false things about

01:57:20.620 the government's competence makes the government more competent, makes your government more

01:57:26.880 efficient. And when state magic breaks, hideous things happen, right? That's the story of Beirut.

01:57:34.400 50 years ago, Beirut was very little different than Vancouver, right? Beirut was a modern city

01:57:41.720 with modern services, a democratic government, blah, blah, blah. But the problem was that

01:57:49.540 its Shiite population was growing, and they had a real identity politics way of delivering services. 0.92

01:57:57.140 So the portion of seats people had in parliament, the portion of government spending,

01:58:01.920 all that was linked to the census. Lebanon canceled the census, and over time,

01:58:07.680 the Shiite population became large and underserviced, and the Christian population

01:58:12.760 got small and over-serviced. And at a certain point, Shiite folks in Beirut

01:58:20.320 realized that if they called the Hezbollah, they were more likely to get their water main fixed

01:58:28.660 than if they called the government. Hamas and Hezbollah are an example of what happens when 0.96

01:58:35.500 state magic fails when you don't go i guess i should call the government you go okay who could 0.99

01:58:42.220 actually solve this problem for me and then you also start doing once once you've lost your state

01:58:48.220 magic then you start really overpaying for stuff and then you've got militias in the streets and

01:58:55.580 all kinds of other stuff falls apart so it's good that we have this delusion but we are playing with

01:59:02.780 fire here because the state is thin on the ground and arbitrary and fairly incompetent at any moment

01:59:11.500 the scales might fall from our eyes and people in south nanaimo might start getting most of their

01:59:18.300 municipal services from the hell's angels people uh in newton right are gonna start getting many

01:59:25.180 of their services from uh uh from former calistani gangs right there's like there are people ready

01:59:34.300 to provide those services more competently especially around protecting life protecting

01:59:40.540 property etc but the consequences of mobilizing those people are devastating the efficiency of

01:59:46.220 your state collapses so i wish canada were relying a little less on state magic but you sure don't

01:59:54.780 don't want it to go away. I understand. Well, we are at the end of our hour. It was a good place

01:59:59.900 to put that. And I think that we're very thankful, not just for the time we've had here and the time

02:00:06.220 we've had this week, but we're thankful for all of you, our viewers. Remember to email me any

02:00:09.800 suggestions you have for the show, any suggested guests, et cetera, and tune in again this coming

02:00:15.320 Tuesday for Mountain Standard Time. Again, Stuart, thank you for having us. Oh, thank you. It's a

02:00:19.960 great pleasure to be here always. Absolutely. All right. We'll see you next week, 9 a.m. Pacific,

02:00:24.440 10 a.m. Mountain on Mountain Standard

02:00:26.540 Time. Have a great weekend.

Western Standard - May 20, 2021

Mountain Standard Time - May 20, 2021

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