00:02:58.940I must admit finding a reliable source of news or newswire service that can yield the most relevant items of the day is rather difficult.
00:03:07.640Most of the available options are pretty colored by bias.
00:03:10.980And with our divergent politics today, there's no way of knowing the next moment that the media search you're currently talking to or currently conversing with or currently consuming is going to completely disagree with you not only on the facts but on the interpretation of what happened.
00:03:23.820So please feel free to comment throughout the course of the show
00:03:25.720or email me directly with any kind of news feeds and news ideas you have.
00:03:29.480Like maybe I'm just not getting it when it comes to the newswire stuff,
00:03:32.940especially if it's BC specific because I need to get grounded in BC more.
00:03:48.140It's that the issue is we have changed as a subject of the news,
00:03:51.400I.e., you know, the humans, the human world, the society we live in, is so tied in political knots, unbiased comments are actually all but impossible.
00:04:00.120Everything is filtered through some kind of marketing matrix, some ploy by a political party, some ultimate end of powerful people trying to stave off any kind of accountability.
00:04:08.040Basically, I guess what I'm saying there is that it's become an echo chamber, but we built the echo chamber, and that's a problem.
00:04:15.200So until we can reestablish independent journalism or investigative journalism,
00:04:18.980we are not going to be very well informed as a populace.
00:04:21.780And here at The Standard, we have our bias.
00:05:37.020You know, I mean, this session in the legislature has kind of come to a close.
00:05:41.020so uh there's not not that stuff to watch anymore but i don't know if folks are familiar with the
00:05:46.060little community in in the kootenays in british columbia uh called rossland i think it's technically
00:05:52.060in the kootenays i'm not sure exactly where the boundary is there but uh the rossland mayor
00:05:58.380by the name of kathy moore uh had to issue a full-scale apology and sort of prostrate herself
00:06:04.860to the CBC for the crime of going down to the United States, Arizona, I think, to get vaccinated.
00:06:12.860And you sort of dig into the story a little more. And it turns out that she is a dual citizen.
00:06:19.800So is her husband. And they went down to Arizona, as I know some people have done,
00:06:26.880and ended up getting herself a vaccination. And I guess that news got back up to
00:06:32.460canada and i don't think it leaked out anywhere i think she told the entire city council that
00:06:37.680she was going down and i don't know if she told them she was i don't think she was intending
00:06:42.220necessarily to get a vaccine down there but she just happened to be down there and had been there
00:06:45.840for a couple of weeks uh and so it was what was interesting to me about it was sort of how the cbc
00:06:53.140uh you know dealt with this story so i yeah there's so thanks for putting that story up
00:07:00.040so there's a picture of her and i listened to the interview that they did with her and it was just
00:07:05.160this horrendous like 10 minute shaming episode where they just asked her the same questions
00:07:11.900over and over again about you know whether she felt terrible for having gone down to the
00:07:15.420u.s to get a vaccine and all this stuff and of course she was in full apology mode
00:07:19.880uh and said you know it was a bad decision all this stuff i don't you know the reason why it
00:07:24.760kind of struck me is i don't understand why people are angry about this are you angry because
00:07:29.220she got a vaccine before you did i mean you know i mean like one of the biggest challenges we've had
00:07:35.560in canada is not having enough vaccines for people i would have thought that you know most
00:07:40.240people sort of under understanding supply limitations would have thought would have
00:07:43.600concluded that if she had the opportunity to go down to the u.s and get a vaccine down there and0.98
00:07:47.300not pull down on our own domestic supply well all power to her and of course city councils and in0.98
00:07:53.080fact most of the provincial legislature and the federal government for that matter they've all
00:07:56.620been doing their work remotely but i just you know i don't get this outrage over uh you know
00:08:04.820somebody going down to to do this especially if she's a citizen so the cbc asked her all these
00:08:08.700questions like you know do you feel like a real canadian and do you know like do you feel like
00:08:12.860you betrayed everybody they then phoned every city councillor on the council in rossland to try
00:08:18.620to get them to call for her resignation and they even i know uh there's another story here from
00:08:24.680back in january earlier in the month where a fellow named bruno tasson who was the the mayor
00:08:31.080of calcigar kind of did the i mean he didn't go to the states but back in back in december during
00:08:36.800christmas i guess he he went off to uh to his cabin in the okanagan somewhere a couple hundred
00:08:41.920miles away from calcigar you know i graduate from high school in in nelson so i i sort of have this
00:08:48.040deep-seated inherent kind of uh dislike for castle guard i guess so you know my first thing was when
00:08:56.120i heard the the mayor of castle guard gone gone to a to a cabin for christmas i thought well yeah
00:09:01.080he's in castle guard i mean of course you're gonna go to a cabin anytime you can uh but he resigned
00:09:06.520over all of the the hate that he got for having done this and it's i just it's i guess the reason
00:09:13.400why these stories kind of strike me is it is just it's worrying to me the degree to which people are
00:09:18.200kind of out for each other and especially mayors and city councillors i mean like these people
00:09:22.920they're not they it's not a lucrative position in these small municipalities and the cbc of course
00:09:29.640in the case of kathy moore and rosslin asked her over and over again are you going to do the same
00:09:32.760thing that bruno tasson from kapsigar did are you gonna are you gonna step down and like i said they
00:09:37.080phoned every single councillor on that on that town council to ask if they would call for her
00:09:42.200her resignation to a counselor they all said nah she told us she was going and you know she's a
00:09:46.780dual citizen we're not really that concerned about it uh you know maybe it wasn't politically astute
00:09:51.100we know that there's a lot of a lot of folks in the community that are angry about it and maybe
00:09:54.940we wouldn't have done it but nobody's calling for her for her resignation and and she had already
00:10:00.080announced i guess she wasn't going to run again so there wasn't really much the cbc could milk
00:10:03.460out of this but you can just see this effort by the cbc to really try to cast shame on people that
00:10:09.020sort of step outside any of any part of what they consider to be the you know the norm and to really
00:10:16.500try to make a story out of this at the expense of of an individual who really from my perspective
00:10:21.800did nothing wrong i don't know i don't know what your take is on it or if you heard about this but
00:10:25.340it just struck me as uh as as quite a story i think that there's two sides of this on the one
00:10:32.680hand there's the question of of who's entitled to the jab or how long do you have to wait in line
00:10:37.720And what's interesting here is that in Canada, we actually have a huge health tourism industry for exit, for getting out of Canada and going somewhere else.
00:10:47.240So it's funny because if this were for any other time, if there wasn't a lockdown and the border closures, that would be the thing that would change.
00:10:55.560So the only reason that people are upset about this, because people go for medical tourism all the time out of Canada.
00:11:01.580They go to Cuba. They pay cash. They go to the United States if they have enough money and they pay cash and they get medical treatment that they can't get in Canada because our medical system is so woefully far behind. That's that's why. So so the funny thing in my mind here is that ironically, this is the one time they're not spending money on it. They're not flaunting their wealth. They yes, maybe a trip to the United States isn't the cheapest thing in the world. But then again, now that flights are empty, maybe they're cheaper.
00:11:28.800the point is that she has family there
00:20:04.120It's generally people from the professional managerial class
00:20:06.860who you know aren't having to come into contact with people every day they're they're the most
00:20:12.080concerned like they've got the height the most heightened level of concern over covid and yes
00:20:15.660and yet they're probably the most insulated from infection they're not essential workers most of
00:20:20.880them have had no loss in pay they've been able to work from home uh without you know losing any work
00:20:26.060and they don't have to get up every day and uh you know worry about whether they're going to be able
00:20:30.600to breathe properly because their job requires some physical exertion it generally requires no
00:20:35.120physical exertion in fact their biggest challenge is finding ways to get themselves out of their
00:20:39.000chair you know every every half an hour so they don't have health risk associated with not moving
00:20:44.400uh and and it's kind of you know others have opined this this isn't my this isn't my take
00:20:49.340but it's an apt one i think that what we're witnessing is sort of like the first uprising
00:20:53.780of the professional managerial class and the first instance of where you've got this class
00:20:59.260of people who are demanding more restrictions not just on the rest of the populace but on
00:21:03.800themselves as well because they're able to derive some level of power out of that that they don't
00:21:08.560normally have over everyday working folks and so that's really you know fundamental and and look I
00:21:13.520mean I'm not uh you know I'm not in the milieu of like I wear a mask when I go outside I'm not an
00:21:18.780anti-masker uh I haven't registered to get vax to get vaccinated yet but it's not because I'm
00:21:23.800opposed to it it's because I'm I'm very low risk and I and I know they've got some supply issues
00:21:29.060and i and i you know i'm willing to sort of hang out in my like i'm i'm technically part of the
00:21:34.180professional managerial class as well which is why i've got some credibility in criticizing these
00:21:37.780guys i'm one of these people that can work from home and doesn't suffer any loss of pay so i'm
00:21:42.420more concerned about making sure that people that really need the vaccine can get it given that
00:21:45.860we've got some some shortage issues here and yet even i can see that there's people that are trying
00:21:50.580to gain and for for their own sort of personal power base and uh and it's concerning to me to
00:21:55.940see organs like the cbc play into this but but of course they are they are literally the the
00:22:01.380mouthpiece for the professional managerial class especially in british columbia so so so i don't
00:22:06.900know if anybody else is defending kathy moore from rossland that poor mayor of rossland uh but but let1.00
00:22:12.820me let me plant the flag of defense for her i i don't think she did anything wrong i think she
00:22:18.100handled the interview very well and it's too bad she's not running again she sounds like a strong
00:22:22.820leader uh which is tough to find in some small some small towns where where they're not lucrative
00:22:27.540positions no maybe she'll end up an mla or an mp for the region that would be good or at least
00:22:32.500take a nomination the the only thing that kind of comes to my mind we'll get into this other news
00:22:37.700stories in a moment here but but it's interesting that you've queued up something here i never
00:22:41.540really thought of it that way the the revolt the revolt of the ruling class i mean i have a book
00:22:46.420called the revolt of the elites it's by somebody out of the states but it strikes me that since
00:22:51.7002001 where where we had of course a september 11th attack and of course that was a direct attack on
00:22:56.980the professional managerial class because that's who was in those buildings that were attacked
00:23:01.300it was their reaction their fear 2008 i mean they were able to underwrite themselves for the most
00:23:06.740part so it was more uh people who were in lower classes that suffered from 2008 and now we're
00:23:12.900into covet and so we've had you know once about every 10 years or so these major shifts in wealth
00:23:19.460and power and decision making and the professional managerial class is getting more insulated all
00:23:25.580the time and the working classes are getting more subjugated all the time in these things i i'd
00:23:30.780never really thought about it that way but that's a very good way of putting it erin yeah the i mean
00:23:35.000the only tweak to that and i think you're right the only tweak i'd make is that i i you know i'm
00:23:39.340like i'm a unapologetic marxist i'm sure your viewers know i'm like i'm a flaming socialist
00:23:45.700lefty and so i i give the red hair is there for a reason i differentiate between the ruling class
00:23:51.900and the professional managerial class i see the professional managerial class is sort of like
00:23:55.280you know to use the old sort of socialist language like the lapdogs of the ruling class basically so
00:23:59.920they're they're they're care but but they're the ones that workers have to deal with every day
00:24:04.040uh and they you know they're like the old mandarins right um from uh from ancient chinese
00:24:09.720society they they don't necessarily have direct power but they exercise a lot of power through0.88
00:24:13.920their bureaucratic control uh and their positioning and and you know because of the way British
00:24:19.220Columbia is geographically set up where you've got these high density areas crammed into the
00:24:23.400southwest corner of the province namely Vancouver where you pretty much have to at the bare minimum
00:24:29.340be a member of the of the PMC to be able to afford to live there workers don't really live in
00:24:34.220Vancouver I mean some do there's still you there's still some working class families in like
00:24:38.620East Vancouver because they you know their parents maybe bought a house in the 70s or something like
00:24:42.720that for $60,000. But for the most part, they've long been chased out to Poco, Coquitlam, Langley,
00:24:50.320way out into Abbotsford, et cetera. And that's why the number one highway is so plugged up all the
00:24:55.580time every morning because it's the entire working class of the Lower Mainland essentially having to0.89
00:25:00.660drive into Vancouver every morning and then drive back out again. And so you get this PMC that they've
00:25:07.620got condos in vancouver uh they've got a very insulated view of the world uh that doesn't
00:25:12.660extend out beyond the boundaries they view even the neighboring municipalities within the lower0.99
00:25:18.180mainland as as suspicious and don't even we don't even want to talk about those those heathens out
00:25:22.740in the interior and the rest of the province and they and they have this real paranoid uh i mean
00:25:28.980i think they're they're worried about a whole bunch of things and covet is sort of this manifestation
00:25:33.300and this outlet for them and and it and it manifests in these kind of ways where even when
00:25:38.500the numbers start to show that we're making gains and starting to get past this thing uh and and and
00:25:43.540we can take steps to start to restart the economy again so we can mitigate the damage that society
00:25:48.100starts to experience because of the economic ramifications of shutting everything down
00:25:52.980they don't like that because it's it's a sudden they like this new paradigm where everybody has
00:25:58.500to you know do what they say uh and and take their advice and listen to them because if they don't
00:26:03.460the consequences are well you're killing people you're uh and so i mean this was just a perfect
00:26:09.060microcosm that sort of demonstrated this this divide in our province it's not just a bc this
00:26:13.620is playing out all over it's exacerbated somewhat because of the rural urban divide in bc uh but
00:26:18.260it's definitely on display here and so anyway more power to kathy moore i hope she uh i hope she keeps
00:26:23.060trucking on maybe she'll reconsider uh whether she's gonna gonna run again uh but anyway let's
00:26:29.220let's move on uh just because i'm going on too long here so i i did watch uh the proceedings in
00:26:35.060the legislature last week as they were sitting and uh i can tell you that the the paid sick leave
00:26:41.460issue uh related to covet is still one of the major things that they're debating in the in the
00:26:46.420legislature we talked about this i think a couple weeks ago uh so the the bc federation of labor
00:26:52.260we're going to have to stop introducing me as the former secretary of the secretary treasurer
00:26:56.020of the bc federation labor was like three years ago i mean i you know we're gonna start talking
00:26:59.940about describing me as like i don't know a local basement dweller or something like that but
00:27:04.580i certainly don't i don't i don't represent them anymore but they you know since i was there they
00:27:08.420come up with a campaign for paid sick leave it's fairly um uh predictable i think coming from a
00:27:14.740central labor organization uh and it's it's i wouldn't say it's picked up any steam necessarily
00:27:20.020within government because they don't they're they're definitely not looking like they're going
00:27:24.820to uh come up with any sort of solution here uh to satisfy the the campaign uh but it's an
00:27:32.420interesting uh debate because uh anybody if you ask the question you know should workers be out
00:27:40.020of pocket um for time off because they have covid most people would probably say no they shouldn't
00:27:48.260be out of pocket uh because the consequence of putting them out of pocket especially if they're
00:27:53.780in low-income jobs is that they're not going to take themselves out of work if they're starting
00:27:58.820to feel symptomatic and they're going to infect more people so so the argument goes like this
00:28:04.260it's actually better for the business if uh businesses are required to pay uh sick leave
00:28:10.900for people that have covet even even if it's not uh otherwise required under the employment
00:28:15.460standards act the challenge for business owners of course especially during covid when when business
00:28:20.740probably is in most sectors probably isn't as good as it has been is that this is a new expense that
00:28:25.780they they haven't had to pay for before they certainly haven't budgeted for it and and the
00:28:30.740ndp is trying to try to strike this balance between you know not allowing labor to be able to
00:28:37.140say well you know the ndp is not not carrying through on on our issues but at the same time uh
00:28:43.380And so they're trying to come up with some sort of a cookie, I think, to throw them.
00:28:47.700But at the same time, they're trying very hard, I think, and intelligently so to not overburden small businesses.
00:28:54.000They're already really struggling during a pandemic.
00:28:57.200But what's so interesting about it is Shirley Bond, she's one of the MLAs here in Prince George.
00:29:03.680She's also the interim leader for the B.C. Liberal Party.
00:29:07.100And she's, you know, I mean, she's doing about as good of a job as any interim leader of an opposition party can do who doesn't themselves intend to run for leadership.
00:29:15.400She's, you know, she's taken them through the tough questions and that kind of thing and trying to stay out of the other candidates way for leadership.
00:29:21.220And we'll talk about leadership in just a moment.
00:29:24.140But, you know, she's sort of glommed on to this issue.
00:29:27.140And it was just interesting to me to watch the BC Liberals sort of criticize the BC NDP government for having no paid sick leave plan.
00:29:35.160uh but there's you know i think the challenge i think for for surely is that and it's not just
00:29:40.940surely obviously it's the whole opposition and and the staff that are that are sort of putting
00:29:44.740together the hit pieces for as as any opposition that's how an opposition works the challenge is
00:29:49.000there i think they're they're trying to be a bit too clever by half here they're trying to criticize
00:29:52.460the bc ndp for not having a paid sick leave plan but they have no intention they i mean they
00:29:57.500wouldn't implement one either and in fact if you really you know if you listen to the second or
00:30:01.380third intervention by Bond, you know, she very quickly gets away from the plight that working
00:30:07.440folks are facing right now and gets it and really focuses on whether or not business folks can pay
00:30:13.040for this and business owners can pay for it and really challenging the BCNDP to say, well, how do
00:30:19.000you plan to pay for this? So on the one hand, they're saying to the BCNDP government, you know,
00:30:23.080you're bad for not having a sick leave, a paid sick leave program for workers, but at the same
00:30:27.880time you government needs to pay for it because employers can't pay for it so it betrays really
00:30:32.620that the again that the bc liberals main concern is over is over employers rather than than working
00:30:39.000folks um and but at the same time they're sort of asking for this while they're while they're
00:30:44.180telling they can't do it i guess they're trying to trap the government into uh into this impossible
00:30:49.400situation the labor minister has um i think done the best he can to try to strike a balance here
00:30:54.920So he's already, and when we spoke about this a couple of weeks ago, he introduced legislation, which will probably pass, requiring employers, and I think actually this may have already passed in the last session, now requiring employers to pay for three hours of clear leave from work to go get vaccinated.
00:31:10.860my questions of course were well okay so that's law now is it retroactive because a third of the
00:31:17.820province uh and probably half of the working for workforce has already been vaccinated so
00:31:23.660you know all of these folks that took time off to go get to go get vaccinated for for their own good
00:31:28.240and also presumably for the good of the business so they're not infecting co-workers uh are they
00:31:32.640out of luck because because the bcndp government didn't get this in in place in time the other
00:31:37.280thing he's doing is that you know I guess I guess labor has sort of come back and said well that's
00:31:42.000great but that's not even close to what we're asking for we're asking for paid sick time not
00:31:45.940just three hours to I mean three hours to go get vaccinated isn't even as much as you get to go
00:31:50.520vote you get four hours to go vote you know uh and so and so what he's what he's responded with
00:31:55.700is this proposal for a something vague about a maiden bc solution uh for a sick leave program
00:32:02.180and there's there's some article I think from the global mail that uh that was talking about this
00:32:06.720but again the same questions come to mind so when are you going to come up with this maiden maiden bc
00:32:12.040sick leave program like and what's it going to be if it's not going to be paid sick leave
00:32:17.620uh and and like isn't it going to be too late like like by by your own estimation we're already
00:32:24.100sort of on the back back end of this thing numbers are starting to trend downwards unless we're
00:32:28.280looking at a fourth wave i mean you're coming up with a plan that uh it doesn't help anybody
00:32:33.380So I think the opposition is going to have more to squeeze out of this piece. And again, it's for small business owners who are probably already pretty strapped. This is probably worrying stuff, not knowing exactly how it's going to come down.
00:32:49.760and and and then hearing you know who knows a few weeks down the road or whenever the legislature
00:32:54.000sits again and they pass this are we going to end up having to pay something we didn't budget
00:32:59.360for all of a sudden by law and what's what's going to be the uh the ramifications for that
00:33:04.400for the business so we'll see how this one plays out and i and i haven't seen whether this same call
00:33:09.360is is is being made in other other jurisdictions i think the federal idp is calling for it federally
00:33:13.920but i mean the federal government doesn't really doesn't really have jurisdiction to to mandate
00:33:18.560this anyhow it's a provincial employment standards act uh and and and in case of
00:33:23.760unionized environments it's a provincial labor code and it wouldn't apply to unionized environments
00:33:27.680anyway necessarily unless it's in the collective agreement because just because you put it into law
00:33:32.640unless you specifically uh impose it on everybody um you know you'd have to negotiate your collective
00:33:38.080agreement so it's interesting stuff to see how this one plays out i think when it comes to sick
00:33:43.040days and and the question of what's going to happen when it comes to covid the sick days
00:33:48.700question for me is is kind of straightforward it's not fair for anybody to be out of pocket
00:33:53.120if if what they're trying to do is stay stay home while they're symptomatic of something that that
00:33:58.320resembles covid or is covid and so they take they take the time that needs to be paid for
00:34:04.980that's not a question uh employers do need to pay for that or it needs to be paid for through some
00:34:09.600kind of uh you know replacement system through the province so it's it's it's paid for by the
00:34:15.900employer the employer takes it as a loss and writes it off against their taxes at the end of
00:34:19.880the year and the province reimburses them they take a credit or something like that so that that
00:34:25.000would be that would be probably i think the simplest policy solution but the deeper principle
00:34:29.960still comes down to questions of sick leave and paid sick time and that sort of thing
00:34:34.140is i mean we don't want to there's always this old problem of like do we want to incentivize
00:34:40.320not working or getting paid for not working well i mean something that covet has displayed pretty
00:34:45.540clearly is that actually it turns out that a lot of the productivity we thought we were getting is
00:34:50.280is capable of being manufactured in the home so if you do have a job where you can do it remotely
00:34:55.620why we're paying all this money on mortgages on on office buildings and all this cost of commuting
00:35:01.500and everything else these the this is irrelevant if you have a hard line internet connection into
00:35:07.260your house or apartment you can do it from home and guess what it cuts your commute time down
00:35:12.380it cuts down on stress and actually if you have kids at home or whatever suddenly you can actually
00:35:17.180attend to that and and you're not spending the same amount of money on child care uh it's a
00:35:21.740different question for working class folks who have uh physical labor jobs and a different way
00:35:26.700of doing things uh and that and those and those jobs need to be treated differently and i think
00:35:31.580that if anything else what needs to happen is i'm not sure where paid sick leave needs to go
00:35:36.620when it comes to more uh professional managerial class jobs most of them have it already but when
00:35:41.660it comes to working class jobs working class people have a right to if they're ill not not0.72
00:35:47.740spread their illness and feel safe in their employment at home for as long as it takes to
00:35:53.500recover from COVID? Well, I mean, people like me would argue that they should have that, right?
00:35:58.700I mean, currently they don't, right? I mean, the majority of folks that are not in a union,
00:36:04.780they get whatever sick leave is available in the Employment Standards Act, which isn't a lot, but
00:36:10.780to be perfectly honest, like even when I used to work in construction on unionized construction
00:36:15.980jobs, we didn't get a lot of sick leave. I mean, basically if you didn't work, you didn't get paid,
00:36:21.340right so i mean i remember a couple of times um you know back when we used to when we used to
00:36:26.300catch colds because we used to interact with people uh you know i'd be feeling sniffly one
00:36:30.700morning or or just crappy or whatever and i'd phone in and say uh you know like uh you know
00:36:36.860i'm not going to make it today this is back when i was roofing right i mean you know the foreman
00:36:40.860would say to me just just come to work i mean you can sit on the corner of the roof and and be sick
00:36:44.380i mean at least you're you're here getting paid being sick right i mean and and that's the kind
00:36:47.900of culture that um that is engendered when when workers don't have sick leave uh now i don't think
00:36:53.580i infected anybody because i literally would be in the corner on the corner of the roof somewhere
00:36:57.740um but if you're in an office uh or if you're in a meat plant for instance um and i'm not just
00:37:04.700talking about covid i'm talking about any kind of uh contagious illness i mean that's that's that's
00:37:09.580why we used to always get so sick all the time you know and probably will again once once things
00:37:14.380start to resume uh so it's it's interesting but what's some you know what again what what this is
00:37:20.620an example of to me is how stupid it is for us to waste all of these this time and these resources
00:37:27.900trying to means test various benefits for people when you know if we had just done what uh you know
00:37:34.780some people in the states are talking about uh in in particular uh Andrew Yang who who ran for the
00:37:40.380the democratic nomination, but also is now running for mayor of New York and is, you know, starting
00:37:45.140to scare the pants off of a lot of the professional managerial class there, because it looks like he's
00:37:49.720got some momentum. He's been talking about a universal basic income for a long time. And this
00:37:53.480isn't a, you know, I mean, I'm a, like I said, I keep saying I'm a, I'm a socialistic minded person.
00:37:58.100This isn't a socialistic idea. This comes from people like Milton Friedman, et cetera, and a
00:38:01.960number of conservative economists. You know, let's get rid of all of the, the wasted bureaucracy
00:38:07.200required to decide whether somebody qualifies for a benefit or not as long as you're a citizen
00:38:13.020of British Columbia uh let's get and we can and the province can afford to do it let's give
00:38:19.120everybody a a bc dividend based on the on the economic performance of the province you can call
00:38:24.940it a ubi you can call it a people's dividend you can call it whatever you want but let's just make
00:38:29.440sure that there's that base there that you know if the province is doing well then we as citizens
00:38:33.640because we own the resources should also benefit uh from that in some regard and it lessens the
00:38:40.280uh the requirement for things like welfare and all these other programs that that people have
00:38:45.160to spend a lot of time trying to qualify for and it's it's cheaper for the taxpayer it's better for
00:38:49.960the recipient and it's better for the economy because people have money to spend at small
00:38:53.320businesses but yet again it doesn't matter you know whether you're a bc liberal or an ndp supporter
00:38:59.160uh in the in the or a member in the legislature you're opposed to that kind of thing because
00:39:04.340you're so stuck in this current paradigm that uh you know god forbid somebody who doesn't need
00:39:10.720the five hundred dollars a month or the thousand or the two thousand dollars a month from a from
00:39:15.020a dividend like this might get the money uh i mean it's just it's just ridiculous so instead
00:39:20.220we're going to spend way more money trying to disqualify people from all these various
00:39:23.900benefits that people can't even keep up with. It's just, I mean, there needs to be a simplification
00:39:29.700of this. I personally think a UBI is the way to go. I know it's a controversial thing,
00:39:34.860but this is another example of sort of the consequence of not having a system like that.
00:39:41.140And I would agree on that now just quickly that, of course, with the universal basic income or
00:39:47.480with the paid sick leave, the point is that it's all going to be too little too late. Things like
00:39:52.460this should have been moved on very quickly and we're losing that opportunity so they were happy
00:39:57.180to seize the power while they had it but did they use it for any good i don't think so yeah in the
00:40:01.800case of covid you're absolutely right i think uh all of these things are going to be too little
00:40:05.080too late but the point is like you know i i'm firmly in the belief that uh this isn't even
00:40:11.440close to so the last time we're in a situation like this i you know i mean i think it was what
00:40:16.400is it moderna is the one um uh vaccine company that that was trying to float the idea about two
00:40:22.040three weeks ago that you know we're probably going to need like an annual or a biannual booster shot
00:40:27.640on on this thing you know we may we may have to keep getting booster shots forever
00:40:31.880um you know and you look at the financial statements of moderna it's a company that uh
00:40:35.960has has had prior to the covet has had some significant financial difficulties and and
00:40:41.240it would probably save them uh to get on this scheme where you know government's buying
00:40:47.480these booster shots from them regularly i don't know if i don't think any of the other pharmaceutical
00:40:51.720companies were saying this none of them none of them are quite in financial straits like i guess
00:40:55.800moderna was so so there's definitely forces out there that you know are just looking to make a
00:41:01.080buck off of this thing and there's there's politicians who really you know whether they
00:41:05.320really understand it or not they really like the power that they get in these kind of scenarios
00:41:10.680um anyway why don't we talk about the uh bc liberal leadership race a little bit
00:41:15.800not a lot not a lot has happened uh in the last couple weeks but uh ellis ross i understand
00:41:24.360formalized his announcement he sort of let the cat out of the bag i heard a rumor i haven't been
00:41:29.400able to see it because i thought you were still under the twitter the uh youtube ban but i i heard
00:41:33.700a rumor he might have appeared on this show recently he was on this show this week he was
00:41:38.380on the show on tuesday so did he so he formalized he formalized his his announcement that he's
00:41:44.060he's thrown in he's the first day yeah that's right to do that so the so the rest of them are
00:41:49.380kind of you know staring at each other waiting to see who who announces next and it's funny like
00:41:57.720you know you watch you watch these characters in the legislature and they're all kind of
00:42:01.480trying to carve out an issue for themselves that they can get some sort of notoriety some of them
00:42:06.080have uh name recognition issues i think one of the front runners uh at least from the perspective of
00:42:12.280the governing party the bcndp gauged on gauge which i gauge by how worried they seem about them
00:42:17.620or how much how much attack they sort of pile on them is this renee merrifield from i think she's
00:42:22.260from colonna rookie mla um who seems to be getting a lot of uh a lot of time in question period so
00:42:29.960she's she seems to be the one asking most of the questions that could be for a number of reasons
00:42:34.200it could be that i don't know whoever's deciding on the opposition side who gets the the spotlight
00:42:39.060in question period either really likes her more than the others or the others are out busy
00:42:43.540fundraising which maybe is closer to the reality uh but it's what's surprising to me is that while
00:42:50.160they're all sort of jockeying around playing games ellis ross from you know from skeena
00:42:55.500just announces like he doesn't uh you know there's no games right he's just like yep i'm gonna run
00:43:01.860here's what here's what i want to do and uh you know like he's not waiting around for all of the
00:43:08.480high profile endorsements that everybody else is probably trying to put together so there's not
00:43:12.240like it which is endearing to me that he doesn't seem to be the type of guy that's trying to put
00:43:16.880together a roadshow kind of thing he's just a straight shooter yeah he's just doing he's just
00:43:21.760busking on the on the street there you know just telling people how preaching preaching to the
00:43:26.320preaching to the people i i really like having ellis on here he gives me honest uh feedback
00:43:31.280about things he gives an honest take about stuff uh he's he's very clear he's his criticism of the
00:43:37.200the government um when it comes to covet and that sort of thing is not just a bunch of talking
00:43:41.160points there's some really intelligent insightful stuff about where the private sector might have
00:43:45.500been more involved what about the taxation what about the increase in taxation what what are we
00:43:50.300going to do to grow the economy what about domestic manufacturing i really appreciate
00:43:53.820ellis's contributions here the other day uh apparently had a bike accident uh he had a fall
00:44:00.200off his bike so so he posted a video there i've liked his page to follow him right he's got a
00:44:05.660video up there of him all kind of like bandaged up and like just telling how it is like what
00:44:10.000happened to him like it's just you know like it's just he's just a real person that's the thing it's
00:44:14.380not all it's not all smoke and mirrors and and lights and cameras it's it's it's just an honest
00:44:19.800guy running an honest campaign i really appreciate that yeah no it's uh that's my take on him as
00:44:25.640well i'll have to go back and watch watch his appearance on this show uh you know i mean there's
00:44:30.160a number of issues that i disagree with him on obviously but he i i said from the very beginning
00:44:34.820i think he's actually the the bc liberals best bet at uh at pulling off a win i i don't think
00:44:40.300anybody else with the exception of i don't know maybe todd stone uh from kamloops he's got some
00:44:44.880cachet in the interior i i guess maryfield could make the claim as well of being from colonna
00:44:48.800but it's it's it's very rare that you get a northern politician uh who who is able to pull
00:44:58.580together a that kind of support base to be able to lead a major party and potentially become the
00:45:02.800Premier of the province, not to mention the fact he'd be the first First Nations Premier of British
00:45:08.040Columbia. I'm sure it would be, I'm sure it wouldn't be received well by the BC NDP that
00:45:14.020the BC Liberals produced the first First Nations Premier of British Columbia, but that always kind0.89
00:45:19.880of seemed, I don't know, I mean, if you go back in the history of Canada, like all those kind of
00:45:23.340diversity firsts always seem to come from more Conservative-ended parties, that's sort of the
00:45:27.020history. The first woman Prime Minister, first woman Premier, I mean, none of them came from
00:45:31.540the so-called socialist parties um so that's interesting it's the same thing even with
00:45:37.760Diefenbaker's government I'm pretty sure that was the first uh Chinese member of parliament uh
00:45:42.560representing uh what is now what is now Chinatown and East Hastings that area of Vancouver he was
00:45:48.180the member elected there I recall yeah and so I mean that's an interesting development uh series
00:45:54.460of developments just just in so much as it totally destroys this narrative on the left
00:45:58.400that they're they're the they're the ones that usher in greater diversity of identity um it
00:46:05.440just destroys that narrative and it's always been something that's brought me a bit of joy
00:46:09.120uh so the other thing i appreciate about uh ellis ross um well first of all i mean you
00:46:15.940referenced his bike accident i i i mean he i was looking at the time stamps on his tweets when he
00:46:21.400announced these things he sort of made his announcement and then that he was running for
00:46:25.440leader and then like within minutes he showed pictures of himself all beat up from his bike
00:46:30.880accident so when i first saw it i was like oh my goodness i hope people are beating him up because
00:46:35.080he announced that he was going to be leader but he just had an unfortunate bike accident so i hope
00:46:39.040he gets well soon um and also i mean i i didn't say that again i don't want you to be the next
00:46:46.360premier somebody just comes out of nowhere and speaking of uh uh folks that need to get well
00:46:52.880soon uh um mike bernier out of the piece uh who's uh also people have speculated he may throw his
00:47:00.440name in as a as a leadership contender he announced uh i think earlier this week that him and his
00:47:05.280entire family have contracted covid so they're going into isolation so i mean that's not good
00:47:09.520news hopefully they um uh they're able to recover quickly uh so i mean it's you know i mean that is
00:47:16.500what it is the thing that really uh i appreciate about ellis ross i was going to say earlier
00:47:21.780you know this you had Stuart on uh you're gonna have him on again today I don't know if he's
00:47:26.820going to talk about the Ferry Creek uh standoff um just just uh southern Vancouver Island around
00:47:32.820Port Renfrew there you've got the situation where there's you know a logging company trying to get
00:47:37.160in to do do work that they've been contracted to do and you've got some protesters as Stuart I
00:47:42.840think explained a couple weeks or a week or so ago trying to block access so there's basically
00:47:47.740a blockade that's been set up and stuart had a or not stuart sorry but ellis ross had a very
00:47:54.020interesting take on this that he posted yesterday i think i included the tweet there um if you can
00:47:59.340post it but he compared it to the wet sweat and dispute over the the coastal gas link uh pipeline
00:48:06.560in and folks we've talked about this in the past as well but people may remember uh earlier last
00:48:13.640year prior to activists throwing debris onto train tracks across the country to try to stop this
00:48:21.040um what it sort of sparked that was basically an rcmp incursion an armed rcmp force with sniper
00:48:28.980rifles the whole bit into wet sweat and territory to tear down a blockade that had been erected by
00:48:34.740a group of people that that identified more so with the hereditary leadership of the wet sweat
00:48:39.680nation than the band council uh who were generally in in support of the project and had sort of
00:48:47.920signed off on it with the provincial government and so it put the provincial government in this
00:48:51.040position of having you know having to say that look we as far as we're concerned we had all the
00:48:57.260the all the consultation had taken place with first nations and and basically they signed off
00:49:02.760on it the difficult part is the interpretation over who holds jurisdiction over over traditional
00:49:07.540treaty territory and over the tradition the entire nation because of course historians will recall
00:49:13.540that when the indian act was set up it was the indian act that created bound councils in some
00:49:17.700cases they were imposed ellis ross of course it tells has a different take on it in the case of
00:49:23.540the heisland nation his his research uh into the history of the heisland nation suggests to him
00:49:28.900that in fact the heisland nation had petitioned the federal government for a band council but of
00:49:33.780course i think as i've said before you know it's it's unclear to me whether you know the petition
00:49:38.900was made because they were really keen on having these ban council systems or whether you know it
00:49:43.780was the only way to sort of access federal funds was to was to was to participate in in this scheme
00:49:49.700but in any case the situation we're in now is that you know most interpretations i think within the
00:49:55.220legal community of the of the landmark dogamick decision of i think 97 or 98 basically attributes
00:50:02.420final authority over over treaty lands outside of the reservations to the traditional hereditary
00:50:08.340not always hereditary but the traditional leadership sometimes elected sometimes
00:50:12.100hereditary whereas the band council's jurisdiction is generally restricted to
00:50:16.740to reserves which are quite small and i know i know a number of band counselors uh i think
00:50:21.460vehemently disagree with that interpretation uh and that plays itself out in the court all the time
00:50:26.340but what's happening in fairy creek is is very interesting as uh as alice ross has pointed out
00:50:32.100out in his tweet here he's saying look like whatever the bc ndp government says about
00:50:36.640reconciliation and and you know getting along better with first nations and restricting
00:50:41.240respecting treaty rights it was it was john horgan and the bc ndp government they quietly
00:50:46.100reached out to the rcmp and said hey can you come in here and you know clean this up and by the way
00:50:51.120we're you know we're gonna we'll pay for it because it probably you know that kind of an
00:50:55.620armed force wasn't in the regular rcmp budget and what was interesting to me is that like
00:51:01.160you know people on the left were basically in favor of this and they fell into this old
00:51:06.760old uh position i think of of ndp governments of of trying to attribute authority to the
00:51:14.120band councils on on cases of resource development because band councils were generally more likely
00:51:20.340to agree to it because they would sign some agreement revenue sharing etc whereas the
00:51:25.640traditional leadership was usually more concerned about environmental concerns etc and so you so
00:51:30.760So from the perspective of a government who may want to favor one position over the other, it's been argued that they've used ban councils against traditional leadership and tried to play them off each other to get the project through.
00:51:42.700Now, I'm actually in favor of the coastal gas link pipeline. I'm in favor of logging. I'm in favor of resource development. I'm in favor of site C. What I'm not in favor of is a provincial government standing by or inviting a federal RCMP force into provincial territory, into what might be sovereign territory for First Nations with snipers and guns and that kind of thing.
00:52:09.020uh i i just don't like it when the federal government gets invited in as an armed force
00:52:14.460uh represented perhaps by the rcmp i would have much preferred it you know i prefer us to return
00:52:19.420to uh to reinvigorate the provincial police force um but i think we have to guard our sort of like
00:52:26.620our provincial sovereignty um in these in these regards and deal with it herself so i had kind of
00:52:32.060a nuanced position on that uh and you could read ellis's tweet i think two ways you could either
00:52:37.740say look like you know the end the ndp he's either just trying to showcase that the ndp uh was was
00:52:46.620willing to send the rcmp in against first nations people out of one side of their mouth while on the
00:52:50.860other side of their mouth they're they're yapping about reconciliation and how everything's you know
00:52:54.860it's a new era of better relationship but i think what he's actually trying to say here uh and it'd
00:53:01.660be good to ask him i suppose is you know why why isn't the ndp calling the rcmp and to clear these
00:53:07.340protesters out the other interesting piece which you know makes the plot thick and even more of
00:53:11.840course is that the band council uh and the band chief uh in that area issued a note um basically
00:53:20.500asking the telling the protesters to take a hike uh telling them to and i think i think that letter
00:53:26.020uh i also said to you as well yeah we'll bring it up just a moment so so the plot sort of thickens
00:53:33.900But it's a it's a it's a total repeat, I think, of what happened in Wet'suwet'en territory, sort of in our neck of the woods up here last year.
00:53:42.480And it's starting to get it's starting to get pretty dicey there.
00:53:45.280Of course, if you if you get on the Internet, you can see videos flying around of loggers that that that had a bit of an altercation with with the protesters.
00:53:54.340And it looked like it got violent. It looked like one of the loggers, you know, went after it because the protester was recording this group of loggers that confronted them.
00:54:03.900And it looks like basically one of the loggers came after him, screaming, swearing, grabbed his phone, and then there's a big tussle.
00:54:10.420And I don't know what really happened there, whether charges are going to be laid.
00:54:14.040But what sort of bothered me about watching that was that, again, you know, like, again, you got working class people that are basically being pitted against people that are concerned about the environment.
00:54:27.680Like, I always try to see, I mean, everything's so polarized right now.
00:54:31.140always try my best to understand that as best i can why people are doing the things they they're
00:54:37.100doing right i can understand why loggers are frustrated with protesters we're in the middle
00:54:42.480of a pandemic it's not easy to get work right now these you know these guys got families to feed
00:54:46.380and their employers are probably telling them all sorts of things about the motivations of people
00:54:51.860that are they're stopping them from doing their work from the perspective of the protesters i mean
00:54:56.340you know i'd like to think that they live there i'd like to think that they they feel some
00:55:00.920ownership over the over the land i i don't know uh the fact that the band council has basically
00:55:07.140condemned them uh suggests to me that they might they might not be from the area i don't know so
00:55:12.520it'd be interesting to see how this stuff starts to play out but it is potentially you know i posed
00:55:18.720this question to stewart parker in the past because he you know he's been around long enough to
00:55:22.300to have known and witnessed in bc this real uh divide between sort of the ndp or or the more
00:55:30.620socialistic uh activists in the province and the and the green party activists and sort of this
00:55:35.260political split that that uh that stewart was very much involved in as as one of the first leaders
00:55:40.600of the green party of british columbia uh but my question was you know are we going to start to see
00:55:46.100this split start to re reemerge as as the ndp is uh you know generally in favor of these kind of
00:55:53.800uh resource development projects uh and and greens generally are not because you know you go back to
00:55:59.580the the 90s when this stuff was unfolding over clackwood sound it was tumultuous in british
00:56:05.320columbia you know tens of thousands of people at the legislature literally storming the legislature
00:56:10.080trying to get in um uh and and uh people chaining themselves to trees you might be a bit too young
00:56:16.640to remember this kind of stuff um but in those days there wasn't there wasn't this same sort of
00:56:22.460divide between at least that i could witness between first nations band councils who were
00:56:27.080generally in favor of these resource projects and activists and or traditional hereditary
00:56:33.000leadership of first nations who were generally opposed to resource projects so it's just another
00:56:37.420example of how the old sort of left-right divide doesn't really doesn't exist anymore and this
00:56:42.980again i mean the the ongoing theme on this stuff is you know you and i are constantly sort of
00:56:49.020frustrated with the identitarians within the professional managerial class that have sort of
00:56:53.360you know they've permeated everything and and they're fundamentally racist from my perspective
00:56:59.700because they're the kind of people that think you know because this person is first nations
00:57:03.680they're automatic they automatically think the way i think they're going to think that
00:57:06.920they're automatically opposed to resource development uh and it leads me back to the
00:57:10.820bc liberal leadership race with uh with the one candidate that's not getting a lot of attention
00:57:15.180which is aaron gunn who's kind of an outsider within that whole milieu he's you know he's got
00:57:20.140a big social media following uh but it's questionable yet is yet to be seen whether
00:57:25.040he can translate that into uh memberships to be able to convince the existing party membership
00:57:30.980of the bc liberals whether he he he can win but he's been running videos you know sort of
00:57:35.820highlighting this divide in fact interviewing a number of prominent first nations leaders
00:57:40.240etc in the province who are you know are absolutely frustrated with with these activists
00:57:46.220who are generally sort of white liberal children of you know like basic for lack of a better term
00:57:53.920rich well-off people who are who are coming to these areas protesting in the names in the name
00:57:59.740of indigenous people i mean it just it just reminds me of of this incident i think it was late early
00:58:06.020last year back in like january 2020 or something where this have you heard of this extinction
00:58:11.440rebellion group um these these are the it's this group i think at it like there's they're in
00:58:18.080vancouver they just took the a whole bunch of them jumped on the ferry a couple of weeks ago
00:58:21.680who went to victoria uh in the middle of a pandemic like i you know uh to and i guess their
00:58:27.600whole piece is you know they believe that like the world's going to end in 12 months or whatever it
00:58:32.640is that you know the the most radical of the climate activists are telling us we're all going
00:58:37.760to die in in in a few months because of the climate emergency and in fact i i know uh like
00:58:44.480seth klein's written this book uh uh that's urging us i can't remember what it's called
00:58:48.560but it's urging us to treat the climate emergency like like a war right so we have to we we have to
00:58:54.320like gear up to fight this war against against the climate um and and these people have decided okay
00:59:00.720so we're all going to be extinct so we we really have nothing to lose so we're just going to go
00:59:05.520all i mean it's a real cult mentality anyway these jokers about 13 of them showed up i guess at
00:59:10.880premier john horgan's house uh sometime last year said they were in in the they were they were doing
00:59:17.760so in the name of indigenous rights etc the local first nations band sent out a letter asking them
00:59:24.480to apologize for coming on their land without permission and protesting at the premier's house
00:59:30.080i mean it's just it had to be the most embarrassing thing and and so i mean it's just quintessential
00:59:34.160sort of bc politics i suppose but uh i thought a wonderful way to round out the the session here
00:59:41.520absolutely well we've got steward in the wings and aaron i understand that you are on your way
00:59:48.040uh working from home as you are part of the professional managerial class
00:59:52.580uh so uh but we'll let you get to it well thanks again i love the show and uh
00:59:59.460uh and it's always a pleasure absolutely we'll see you again next week aaron thank you you bet
01:00:06.240well we're uh we're switching gears here we've got uh stuart parker on president of the los
01:00:13.420altos institute who uh can now undo all of the left-wing damage from the pro development guy
01:00:19.620uh and now bring us back into uh conservation from the left uh what what what what's on the
01:00:26.240news today, Stuart? What's the big headline for today? Well, I actually think some good news
01:00:32.080happened, and I'm pretty happy about it. Sorry about the echo, by the way. I've just moved into
01:00:36.780this area, and this room is not padded enough. I mean, obviously, I need a completely padded room
01:00:42.980to be truly successful, but I'm actually celebrating a little bit because we don't know
01:00:51.840how the Bill Gates divorce fits into all this, but I am really excited that the U.S. government
01:00:59.040is now backing an end to enforcing intellectual property rights for vaccines. I thought I would
01:01:05.900actually come and say something good about the world, because I think intellectual property
01:01:11.980rights are one of the stupidest, worst things that's happened to our society. And I, and I'm
01:01:22.080really, it's nice to see people rising to the occasion for a change during COVID and having a
01:01:29.580decent response. First, Melinda Gates by divorcing Bill Gates, perhaps in a matter not totally
01:01:36.640unrelated to Gates's opposition to releasing the intellectual property rights for COVID vaccines.
01:01:44.840But now we see the U.S. government taking a cue from the divorce and realizing that they don't
01:01:55.120know which allies they're going to lose if they keep this regime going. Intellectual property
01:02:02.380rights are fundamentally anti-work. And a lot of people think that things like vaccines need
01:02:13.360intellectual property rights to be developed. But the reality is that most of the vaccines we've
01:02:17.860developed were developed before intellectual property rights regimes that we have now were
01:02:23.040enforced. And many of the early, you know, medical breakthroughs, even when there were
01:02:32.740intellectual property rights, the creator of the vaccine or other invention simply gave those
01:02:41.740rights away. They thought it was inappropriate. That's what Nikola Tesla did with alternating
01:02:47.500current. That's why we don't have a power plant once every three blocks. It's because we used to0.96
01:02:58.300understand that if an idea is true, we don't own it. It's God's idea. That's what people believed
01:03:08.260in the Middle Ages. The only ideas that people can own are lies. And so I'm glad to see that,
01:03:16.860but I'm really hoping that it leads to a major reevaluation of what we're doing with these
01:03:23.700intellectual property rights in other areas. I'm not saying all property rights are bad,
01:03:29.880but I am saying that some property rights are silly and they get in the way.
01:03:37.780I think that there's no small amount of questions around the issue of intellectual
01:03:45.400property rights as well as well and patents in general this has always been kind of a problem
01:03:49.700is that you work your life at whole at something how do you have a right to earn a living off of
01:03:55.260it after you've managed to invent something well perhaps you do but even there that might not be
01:04:00.740perpetual and certainly it shouldn't turn into a rentier system this seems to be the biggest problem
01:04:05.360with with a lot of the issues we have today is that everything has become rentier we don't have
01:04:10.000new development why don't you just why don't you just make a better economy where people can
01:04:15.520participate in it and share things in it in a better way yeah and uh sanford very good point
01:04:22.580tesla died broken alone is that fair no it's not but um he gave those intellectual property rights
01:04:31.820away and i think that he died um you know what being broke is not the worst way to die
01:04:38.620uh being uh unprincipled is the worst way to die uh being ungenerous is a bad way to die
01:04:47.520i'd rather die broke than unprincipled and ungenerous so uh i think that's um uh you know
01:04:55.460you look at also you look at an economy like india's uh one of the you know india has consistently
01:05:03.800been a holdout on intellectual property rights it's one of the few common policies that narendra
01:05:09.480modi carried on after the congress party stopped being the natural governing party and what does
01:05:15.480that mean it means that people in india pay a tiny fraction for their prescription medications that
01:05:22.200we do um it allows for um it's allowed for huge improvements in the indian economy because uh
01:05:33.480everybody can get treated for common illnesses affordably um with um with these prescription
01:05:41.240medications but it means that we have brutal trade barriers against india because they violate this
01:05:47.240and so you try buying i mean india is the second largest english-speaking country on earth more
01:05:52.120english speakers in india than well three times as many english speakers in india as canada
01:05:57.160and they have a major english language publishing industry but we don't get to read that stuff
01:06:02.440because crippling tariffs are placed on intellectual property that's generated in india
01:06:09.880you try and buy a a good indian book on amazon you're going to pay 350 bucks for a 350 page book
01:06:17.240even though it's being produced in India for a pittance.
01:06:21.720So the thing is, a knowledge economy, a successful knowledge economy,
01:06:28.060is an economy where knowledge moves fast and it goes everywhere.
01:06:33.360When you hoard knowledge, it's like an economy based on hoarding anything else.
01:06:38.580It moves around inefficiently and it benefits too few people.
01:06:44.340And so I think we've really got to reexamine the enforcement of intellectual property rights and recognize that it has been a way for people in the global north or the first world to continue making money off tasks they're no longer involved in.
01:07:07.380So we patent a technology. We de-industrialize. We go, oh, whoop-de-doo, we're hitting our carbon targets because we've moved the factory to India. And people there are having most of the profits skimmed off by the person who owned the idea.
01:07:23.820I think one of the reasons India really stuck its foot in is that when Monsanto sequenced the genome for basmati rice, they patented it.
01:07:35.500And India's like, no, you don't own the idea of all our rice that we spent 6,000 years carefully breeding.0.52
01:07:48.020And by the way, that's what cultural appropriation used to me.0.75
01:07:52.040Cultural appropriation was not Brown University students protesting the shawarma stand because they've discovered it's been run by a Mexican.0.72
01:08:01.920Cultural appropriation has nothing to do with that stay in your lane nonsense.0.97
01:08:06.280Cultural appropriation was originally an idea Marxists had when they saw Columbia Records going into the southern United States, recording a bunch of folk music, releasing it on vinyl and claiming they owned the songs.
01:08:28.060It was about taking things that people as a culture had made together and stealing them.
01:08:33.560um yeah and so i mean i find the current cultural appropriation discourse nutty but i think one of
01:08:40.900the reasons we made a nutty new definition was so that we couldn't talk about how our intellectual
01:08:47.740property rights regime actually runs and how much the person who owns the intellectual property
01:08:54.180to a thing isn't necessarily even the inventor it's the guy who got to the office first
01:09:00.580and that and that's just it that's the thing that becomes so questionable so quickly i mean it's the
01:09:07.100thing that's happening with our real estate markets as well i so so i'm supposed to pay the
01:09:11.960difference in the exorbitant cost of inflation that's inside of your home i'm not saying it
01:09:16.560wasn't an investment for you but i just didn't happen to be born in 1970 so i didn't get into
01:09:21.960the market when it was good now i have to pay the difference like well why don't i why don't you and
01:09:27.480i just go make a deal somewhere else i'll pay you a reasonable price for it and if there needs to be
01:09:31.900more than that i don't know um maybe there's some other arrangement that can be arranged but it this
01:09:37.060this like this is not i remember when four hundred thousand dollars was a doctor's house like i don't
01:09:42.040think a bc bungalow is worth four hundred thousand dollars in prince rich i'm sorry i don't know what
01:09:46.320you've done to it i don't care how you renovated it four hundred thousand dollars a lot of money
01:09:50.240for a bc bungalow and that's now looking low there's people asking 430 450 and 480 for something
01:09:56.520that was built in 1960 with two by four walls. No, it's, it's crazy the way, um, uh, the way
01:10:04.180real estate prices have, well, they've lifted off and people keep talking about, we've got to stop
01:10:09.640all this real estate speculation. We need a better speculation tax. We need a graduated
01:10:14.980speculation tax. This isn't speculation. This is a sure thing. Like speculation. I have a little
01:10:22.860less problem with somebody making a big windfall if they're actually speculating, i.e. if they have
01:10:29.520a chance to lose. If they're taking a risk, sure, people who take risks should get rewards.
01:10:37.880But the BSE real estate market isn't risky. Your property isn't going to go down in value.
01:10:45.840There isn't a chance you'll lose the property after you buy it. Those things aren't real.
01:10:51.960you buy in and if the property prices even go down if the assessed value of your home goes down
01:10:58.560people freak out it's like oh no i'm gonna have to pay less taxes next year but my my investment
01:11:06.340has gone down maybe it'll take five years for me to make a hundred thousand dollars instead of two
01:11:12.680years oh my goodness i might have to ride out a couple of years of mild depreciation this is not
01:11:19.780speculation like in the 19th century when people were doing the original capitalism and like you
01:11:28.160know children were stuffed in chimneys and all kinds of bad stuff was happening
01:11:32.100one of the things that people you know they had these stories right the horatio alger stories
01:11:39.080right where there'd be a character he'd be a working class guy with no money and
01:11:47.160And he would eventually become rich. And every one of those stories pivoted on something called the big break, because everybody could see the other guys at the factory were working hard and working hard by itself wasn't enough.
01:12:07.100you needed working hard and you needed an idea and you needed luck luck that third ingredient
01:12:15.740which is the big break that all these novels are based on you look at a modern capitalist hero
01:12:22.480novel like pursuit of happiness that they made into that will swift's myth movie 10 years ago
01:12:28.500or whatever what's that movie about it's about the idea that anybody who works hard enough
01:12:33.820will strike it rich. And that's nonsense. Most hardworking people won't strike it rich.
01:12:40.480And so if you take extra risks, then I can see there being a moral logic to you getting a big
01:12:48.800windfall. But we use terms now like secure investment climate. That's code for when
01:13:01.120billionaires show up and invest and their bet doesn't work, the public has to bail them out
01:13:06.260with our taxes. That's what secure investment climate means. It's like, you know what? I think
01:13:13.040Jeff Bezos is okay. I think he could stand not to win every time he allegedly speculates.
01:13:20.800And the other thing is, of course, you end up with a financial elite that are dumb
01:13:28.040because they've rigged the game so much that they can't lose. That doesn't produce a competitive
01:13:35.300intelligent elite. That produces an elite of inbred idiots who are drinking their own bath1.00
01:13:41.660water. That's what, you know, the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, all that was
01:13:47.060supposed to get rid of. But instead, we have this idea that if people are already rich,
01:13:52.480We can't possibly let them lose. I'll never forget Rachel Notley's secure investment climate speech
01:13:59.400after she got into office about, well, what good are you? You know, this isn't a matter of selling
01:14:06.820out to the oil industry. Medium-sized oil hated Rachel Notley. What she sold out to was the idea
01:14:14.780that a billionaire should be rolling with loaded dice, that it's got to come up seven every time
01:18:27.320the commissar class versus the owner class.
01:18:30.880And these folks are duking it out. And the thing is, they're focused on each other.
01:18:37.160They are not looking down at the people they're using as pawns in their war. Right.
01:18:43.420We're out there duking it out and there's stupid culture wars every day.0.99
01:18:48.080You know, the owner class is really hoping we're going to fight the next election over the question of whether women have penises.0.99
01:18:55.040Right. That's if they could just make that be the election issue, the owner class would win.1.00
01:19:00.880If we fight it over, you know, cap and trade or carbon taxes or something, that's going to be the manager class getting their appealing issue going and lots of people showing up and voting for that.
01:19:14.520But at the end of the day, the problem is these elite factions have been pulling further and further apart culturally, further and further apart in terms of their theory of work.
01:19:26.400Right. Republicans are with the owner class.
01:19:29.380The Democrats are with the manager class and their vision is not really trained on us at all.
01:19:38.220What? And a lot of their tactics involve declaring the non-personhood of the other side.
01:19:47.980So they're also becoming less empathetic towards each other.
01:19:51.140There is a great, great show that I strongly recommend people try and find on whatever streaming service they have called Succession.
01:20:00.820It's a fictionalized version of Rupert Murdoch and his family.
01:20:08.400And Brian Cox plays the Rupert Murdoch character absolutely brilliantly.
01:20:13.140brilliantly but the best episode is where they're fox news and they're trying to buy
01:20:18.880a liberal television network to add to their portfolio and the owner and the uh and so they0.79
01:20:29.700have to go and meet with these yankee uh over-educated folks um at their country retreat
01:20:40.280and you really see that for the elites they've pulled so far apart culturally from each other0.96
01:20:48.040they can't even talk to each other anymore that's what you see on the floor of the american senate
01:20:53.880that's why people like john mccain became obsolete there's no conversation to be had
01:20:59.720anymore between these groups they have dug in and because of the climate event they're also
01:21:06.680figuring a lot of people are going to die this century, and that raises the stakes as to who's
01:21:15.640going to be on top when we squeeze through this thing. So, yeah, I think empathy is generally in
01:21:21.840short supply, and one of the signs of it is when you hear about, you know, this sort of triggering
01:21:30.280or content warning, all this stuff about, you know, how people have to feel safe, how we always
01:21:35.980have to feel safe we can't make a remark or use a term that makes someone feel unsafe
01:21:40.100saying things like and of course the worst thing you can say to someone to make them feel unsafe is
01:21:46.360you know you don't really seem to be who you say you are and that's what freaks people out
01:21:54.760because the manager class has decided that living in a fool's paradise is your right
01:22:02.000and that if people don't pretend that the nonsense you say about yourself is true,
01:22:16.780If you become enraged or despondent because someone says,
01:22:22.060you know, you're not really acting like the person you said you were,
01:22:26.220that's a sign you need to go to the doctor.
01:22:29.040That's a sign you need a lot of time on a couch.
01:22:32.000with a qualified professional but we have normalized that personality architecture
01:22:37.760it is now our assumption that everyone is a clinical narcissist and when people start
01:22:44.800treating you like you're a clinical narcissist then you start acting like one and i think that
01:22:50.800is where a lot of the empathy drain is happening it's this combination of an elite split uh leavened
01:22:59.040by normalizing clinical narcissism there's there's a few points in there i want to touch on i think
01:23:07.440one of the things that you mentioned there that i think is very true is is that the elites are
01:23:12.640pulling so far apart and people are pulling so far apart we forget that where the civil war
01:23:18.080started for the united states was not uh on the firing of fort sumter it was actually in the u.s
01:23:24.000senate floor when when a bill caused one senator to start caning another one into unconsciousness
01:23:30.360i believe is what yes charles sumner uh yeah it was um uh yeah south carolina senator um yeah
01:23:39.400it caused permanent head injury you wonder why sumner was interested in punishing the south
01:23:44.200later uh that would be the headaches he had continuously for the rest of his life um yeah
01:23:50.380It's a it's really important to recognize that we have seen parts of this movie before.
01:23:57.620Maybe we should do something about it before we get to the next part.
01:24:02.820You know, and I think this is reflected in our own interactions.
01:24:05.940I was talking with my friend, Art, yesterday, somebody you should definitely have on the show who's the first person ever elected as a Green Party city councilor in this country.
01:24:16.680and he was saying you know i think it's a real mistake that we're taking police liaison officers0.54
01:24:23.700out of our schools there are very few you know we're we're teaching this gender ideology
01:24:30.720where we're telling boys they have to like cops and if we don't they're if they don't like cops0.54
01:24:37.880if they don't want to be cops we're going to start amputating parts of their bodies
01:24:41.900but at the same time we're also saying cops are evil and they have to be out of the school and
01:24:48.360he said well you know i've got two sons and you can't deliver them that one-two punch right you
01:24:53.880can't say if if you don't like these people you're not a boy and then say these people are evil you're
01:25:00.880not allowed to see them and he also said you know like cops also deal with inequalities of violent
01:25:09.240coercive force like what if you abolish the police what is your answer to uh violence against women
01:25:16.620what is your answer to violence against children uh and the response was that all kinds of
01:25:23.980environmental activists uh unfriended him immediately there was no conversation to be
01:25:30.720had it was like well you've crossed the line and now you're one of the evil people
01:25:34.660and it was interesting it was funnily enough it was a communist party activist uh uh who said this
01:25:42.740to me he said you know i actually think one of the big problems today is that we are too ideological
01:25:52.600and too political in how we define our communities the healthy social communities should have a
01:26:00.000diversity of political opinion there shouldn't be a set of things that you can't say in your
01:26:07.540friend circle you should have a pluralistic friend circle in terms of like you know and
01:26:15.120so many culture little subcultures have become ideological have become political
01:26:23.360one of the reasons i keep playing dungeons and dragons is that it is one of the few
01:26:28.080new hobbies that really polices the boundaries and said, you're not politicizing this space.
01:26:35.780You know, we're going to sit down, uh, Republicans, Marxists, everybody, we're going to roll some
01:26:42.220dice. They're going to have a good time. And that used to be lots of communities, but you know,
01:26:48.080I have a friend who teaches yoga and the yoga community has split into warring factions along
01:26:55.380political issues that have nothing to do with the practice of yoga and so it's weird to say
01:27:02.660as a person who's been politically active my whole life one of the things that's wrong is there's too
01:27:07.980much politics stirred into everything we have really got to take a step back and you know it
01:27:16.540and the funny thing is of course it's the political agendas of the elites who've fallen
01:27:23.780out with each other, that they're just trying to recapitulate in our communities, and we shouldn't
01:27:28.940follow their lead. This is a bad moment for the elite consciousness. Oh, yeah, there's just one
01:27:34.680other thing I wanted to mention before we completely get off that split elite. Why do we
01:27:39.560know J.P. Morgan's name? Why is he famous? He was, for a brief time, the richest man in America,
01:27:46.380but for most of the time, he was a leading public figure in America. He was not.
01:27:49.960The reason we know his name is that every time the economy went into recession, when Morgan was a big owner, he organized the bailout.
01:28:03.140The private sector companies, the big railway companies and the banks and those folks would get together and bail out the economy.
01:28:18.620Today, and then this thing happens in 1929, where J.P. Morgan's, you know, on his last legs, he's not the leader anymore.
01:28:30.840The business community tries some sort of half-assed efforts to get out of the Depression, but the Depression is too deep.
01:28:37.380And during those three years before Franklin Delano Roosevelt takes power, this new business consensus builds that it's the job of the government to bail out the economy, not the job of the economy's winners to bail out the economy.
01:28:54.780And so I guess I would add that as the third ingredient in what's gone wrong with the elite.
01:29:01.760And there I will agree with you that big government, that as much as the New Deal brought us great things like old age security and socialized health care and things like that.
01:29:14.360It also brought us the expectation that the economy's winners can afford to sit back and let the state do their job.
01:29:24.780And to all of our detriment, especially when they start to lean into the disasters and expect those bailouts through disaster capitalism, because that's not good.
01:29:35.580yeah this has been uh what what do we know about covid it's been you know a huge wealth transfer
01:29:42.520upwards uh and uh you know it uh i think a lot of people felt that covid was going to be some
01:29:51.000great opportunity to like reimagine our societies rather than just dig the hole deeper and faster
01:29:57.900but i think uh with the exception of a few jurisdictions um there there wasn't that
01:30:07.180leadership because the people who could have offered it were in no position to offer it
01:30:13.820nope they weren't they weren't perhaps something then that we can kind of bring bring things home
01:30:18.780a bit on is actually uh there were two things mentioned by aaron earlier in the program that
01:30:23.020that I know you have strong opinions about.
01:30:25.100You've rehearsed them a little bit before,
01:30:26.720but it's always good to kind of look at them again in a new way.
01:30:30.480And one of those is, of course, in no uncertain terms,
01:30:34.680that while Aaron is in favor of the coastal and gas pipeline
01:31:05.360That's turning into physical altercations now,
01:31:07.640and nobody really knows who's on side and who isn't.
01:31:10.780I think maybe the simplest thing to say here,
01:31:13.460just as a final comment before I hand it over to you,
01:31:15.460is that I do think that the coercive power of the state
01:31:18.700can be abused by anybody, right-wing or left-wing.
01:31:21.000and one thing that was very odd to me and it was and we've talked about this a little bit before
01:31:24.680too is that when i brought this up a year ago just before covid when my panel was meeting
01:31:28.760the community radio station uh in person not just digitally or by phone uh it was the social
01:31:35.600democrats that were the most in favor of bringing out the army they wanted the army and they wanted
01:31:40.560the army now and we're gonna we're gonna send in the troops and we're gonna clear these people out
01:31:44.900of the way i thought it was very odd it wasn't the right winger it was the the social democrat
01:31:48.800who was in favor of this. Yeah. And I think there's a real problem that it doesn't even
01:31:54.080extend to all protests. There's a made in BC problem. There's an especially bad way we do it
01:31:59.980here. So the first thing is, as somebody way off on the far left, not the medium left or anything,
01:32:06.800but in this day and age, I'm, you know, as far left as it gets, which, you know, for dead
01:32:12.680communists would be a thing to mourn all by itself um what i would say is i generally think
01:32:20.820that if you're rich enough to have a lot of stuff um you're probably rich enough to pay for guarding
01:32:28.400it i'm not a big fan of using the resources of poor people to guard the things of rich people
01:32:35.140And this brings us to what is wrong with the law enforcement around every major logging road or pipeline blockade we've seen in British Columbia for the past several decades.
01:32:48.540We have laws on the books that prohibit you from blocking a public roadway.
01:32:54.020We have laws on the books that prohibit you from trespassing on private property or on certain forms of alienated public land.
01:33:03.460So there are laws on the books that you can use to arrest logging road protesters.
01:33:10.000Now, I was arrested twice in logging road blockades in the 90s.
01:33:15.180And let me tell you, it was never even contemplated that those laws would be used to arrest me.
01:34:14.960It was one of those brilliant government moves
01:34:17.560was going to end up costing more money they were going to liquidate a small stand of trees it was
01:34:23.080going to cost the government more money to actually put the road in auction the thing off
01:34:28.680deal with us protesters then the value of the timber and then once the timber was gone it was
01:34:34.360going to destroy a community's drinking water system they'd have to bring in chlorination and
01:34:38.920all this new treatment stuff big hole in the budget so um they um the company had gone to
01:34:49.000i think it was slow can forest products don't remember had gone to the supreme court and had
01:34:53.400obtained an injunction against all the people that had been in the newspaper saying they were
01:34:59.320going to do the blockade and then also against john doe jane doe and persons unknown so yes
01:35:08.760that is what the end of all of these court injunctions say this is a really creepy thing
01:35:18.440in our laws so nobody who blockades these roads goes to jail for blockading the road
01:35:25.800they go to jail for violating an order of the court in which they're not named
01:35:32.420So I sought and obtained standing as persons unknown.
01:35:39.780Selwyn Romilly, he was a justice of the Supreme Court at the time, and happened to have been an old drinking buddy of my uncle's.
01:35:47.980He wasn't going to rock the boat and get overturned by the appeal court because this is just how business is done in D.C.
01:35:54.760But he and I had some fun by me representing Persons Unknown for a day in the Supreme Court and going, I'm Persons Unknown. Persons Unknown thinks this. But that's why the sentences are stiff. That's why the law enforcement is really extreme.
01:36:18.360it's that people and one of the things about this is the only thing you're charged with is
01:36:22.840contempt of court with contempt of court there's something called civil contempt of court where
01:36:28.600you can receive a fine of up to um a fine of up to any amount of money the court chooses
01:36:34.280and up to five years in jail there's an aggravated version of this under which i was charged where
01:36:40.920you uh it's actually one of two offenses in canada where technically you can still get the death
01:36:45.240penalty. It's mutiny and criminal contempt of court. So you can be fined any amount of money
01:36:52.580and given any punishment the court deems fit. And that's because you're violating the authority of
01:37:00.680the court itself. And this, of course, is supposed to be destructive of the law itself.
01:37:09.280And what this means is you get extreme sentences, extreme behavior, extreme policing.
01:37:15.240why don't we just use the laws for blocking public roads?
01:37:44.020get the approval of a legislature don't hand this to the bc supreme court over and over and over
01:37:52.400again because of course the bc supreme court's experience of this is that um well their orders
01:37:58.140are not respected by environmentalists that's like or anti-abortion activists being the other
01:38:04.440group um there are lots of persons unknown who have been arrested at abortion clinics in the 80s
01:38:10.580and the 90s. And the worst thing about it is that even though it can carry a custodial sentence in
01:38:18.560years, you don't have a right to a jury trial. The other feature of contempt of court is because
01:38:27.380it's an offense against the court, only the court can judge the offense. So you don't get a criminal
01:38:33.920record. I can still cross the border and pass a criminal record check. But the flip side of this
01:38:39.160is I never had a chance to go for jury nullification. I never had a chance to put my
01:38:44.400case to my fellow citizens. So these blockades are messed up in so many ways. Now, to get to the
01:38:53.540other point about the fact that there are now physical altercations on the road,
01:38:58.460the left used to have, you know, kind of a pacifist consensus about our politics.
01:39:04.740and there's a simple reason for that um the canadian left sucks at violence it has no
01:39:12.660competence at it um i you had chris elston on this show i don't know whether you got to see
01:39:19.140the video of like eight antifa trying to attack like a guy with no training in fighting and he's
01:39:25.080like wearing this weird awkward sandwich board and somehow he fights off eight guys that's that's
01:39:32.180the Canadian left trying to do a fistfight. Like, it's just a humiliation. And whether you read
01:39:38.000von Klausowitz or whether you read Sun Tzu, one of the rules is don't escalate to something where
01:39:45.740you're at a greater disadvantage. Stick to the peaceful protests. You're less bad at them.
01:39:53.200If you want to escalate to violence, like, sure, those Trumpians doing the bumpkin push in D.C.
01:39:59.540this january that was pretty humiliating but let me assure you our our weird shaman guy is not
01:40:09.020going to handle himself nearly as well as the trump people's weird shaman guy like that guy
01:40:15.300probably had a move or two our weird shaman guy has no moves so um this is this is a major problem
01:40:24.280And there's a very simple reason for why things are circling the drain here.0.65
01:40:29.620It's that we've run out of Quakers.0.99
01:40:32.700The Quakers trained everybody in civil disobedience.
01:40:38.240And the Quakers had a huge body of knowledge that they built up in their religious community over hundreds of years of how to control your emotions, how to control your body, how to be dragged away without your body reacting.
01:40:52.280reacting, all of this stuff. There's a discipline to it. But like so many of the great
01:41:01.540left Protestant denominations, the Quakers have mostly died out. There aren't enough Quakers,1.00
01:41:10.660and the ones we have are too old. And so the tradition for how you were trained to do a1.00
01:41:16.600logging road blockade, no one has stepped into the breach to educate a new generation about
01:41:24.220why we don't escalate and how we don't escalate. And so you then just get a lot of embarrassing
01:41:33.780antics. You know, the next decade, I think before the fever breaks, we're going to see some
01:41:40.440amazingly incompetent fighting on the news. And I'm sure we'll all have friends who are in those
01:41:50.620fights on whose behalf we're wincing. Well, I never thought that I would link Quakerism to0.62
01:41:59.240blocking a logging road, but I now understand. And I miss the Quakers too. I really like Nixon
01:42:06.660myself but that's a different point altogether yes the other kind of quaker or original original
01:42:13.860nixon was a quaker it was only after he lost the 1960 election that he went on that weird tear i uh
01:42:21.780i'm pretty happy with vice president nixon vice president nixon was one of the greatest vice
01:42:26.660presidents america ever had president nixon didn't work out so well but uh you know at least he
01:42:33.620created the epa before he was impeached that uh that was an achievement it is a weird fact that
01:42:42.260the epa and the you know state park system the national parks were both created by republicans
01:42:47.580it's a it's a bizarre fact well um if uh if folks would care to listen to one of my uh podcast
01:42:56.880resources on Los Altos radio. I think they're actually rerunning it right now on CFUR at eight
01:43:04.500o'clock on Friday nights. But anyway, we did a show, my friend Dan and I did a show looking at
01:43:13.760this one play written in England in 1420 and how it was hugely prescient, predicted all kinds of
01:43:21.140things about the world described the rise of capitalism. And one of the episodes is about
01:43:27.640the creation of the national park system in the U.S. and how that worked. And it's important to
01:43:38.060remember that the national park system originally was a money-making enterprise that was necessary
01:43:47.620to fund putting a railroad over a mountain pass.