Western Standard - Mountain Standard Time - May 6, 2020

00:00:00.000 No big deal.

00:00:01.060 It's like two minutes long, not even.

00:00:30.000 Thank you.

00:01:00.000 Thank you.

00:01:30.000 Thank you.

00:02:00.000 Good morning, and welcome to Mountain Standard Time.

00:02:03.880 Of course, I'm your host, Nathan Gita, and today I'll be joined at first by Aaron Ekman,

00:02:08.560 former Secretary-Treasurer of the BC Federation of Labour,

00:02:11.020 to discuss various news items that are happening here in British Columbia,

00:02:14.720 all over the map, all over the place, and things that we'll both have hot takes on.

00:02:18.980 And then, of course, in the second half, we have Stuart Parker coming on.

00:02:22.840 He'll be explaining his own understanding of what's happening with various protests

00:02:27.040 and the lockdowns of the vaccines around both Canada and, of course, British Columbia.

00:02:31.800 If you like the Western Standard, then continue to like us on Facebook and subscribe.

00:02:36.480 And ensure that you always, always, always check out our website proper.

00:02:41.440 It does cost money at times if you need to get past the paywall,

00:02:44.940 but that's how we support the content we make here.

00:02:47.800 And that's because we don't take any government funding or any government subsidies.

00:02:52.080 My opening statement this morning is rather brief.

00:02:54.440 It just has to do with the news itself.

00:02:57.040 Where do you get your news?

00:02:58.940 I must admit finding a reliable source of news or newswire service that can yield the most relevant items of the day is rather difficult.

00:03:07.640 Most of the available options are pretty colored by bias.

00:03:10.980 And 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.

00:03:23.820 So please feel free to comment throughout the course of the show

00:03:25.720 or email me directly with any kind of news feeds and news ideas you have.

00:03:29.480 Like maybe I'm just not getting it when it comes to the newswire stuff,

00:03:32.940 especially if it's BC specific because I need to get grounded in BC more.

00:03:37.460 I need to understand it better.

00:03:38.500 Sometimes I have a bit too much of a federalist perspective,

00:03:41.220 so it would be good to be more grounded in British Columbia.

00:03:43.320 Now as a final thought, maybe the issue at hand isn't that it is difficult

00:03:46.520 to find reliable news itself.

00:03:48.140 It's that the issue is we have changed as a subject of the news,

00:03:51.400 I.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.

00:04:00.120 Everything 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.

00:04:08.040 Basically, 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.

00:04:15.200 So until we can reestablish independent journalism or investigative journalism,

00:04:18.980 we are not going to be very well informed as a populace.

00:04:21.780 And here at The Standard, we have our bias.

00:04:23.440 We're very clear about that.

00:04:24.720 And maybe that's not your cup of tea,

00:04:26.840 but we don't take government money because that would warp our narrative.

00:04:29.780 So I encourage you to support us or support anybody who's in independent journalism.

00:04:33.740 And that way you'll have all the facts

00:04:35.940 and you can make the best decisions for yourself and for your city.

00:04:40.220 Sorry, my microphone's being a little bit silly today,

00:04:42.540 but I'm good to go here.

00:04:44.080 Of course, I've got Aaron on the line.

00:04:45.640 Aaron, it's good to see you.

00:04:47.500 Howdy.

00:04:47.940 Thanks for having me.

00:04:48.680 You can hear me okay?

00:04:50.020 Yes, absolutely.

00:04:51.280 Absolutely.

00:04:52.000 Great.

00:04:53.180 Well, it's just wonderful to be here.

00:04:55.480 I like Western Standard viewers a lot.

00:04:57.820 They're an engaged person.

00:04:59.640 I have to admit, I haven't been able to watch the show the last week.

00:05:03.940 I thought the dreaded YouTube ban was still in effect, but I'm glad to hear that you're

00:05:09.540 back on the air again.

00:05:10.840 Yeah, no, you know what?

00:05:11.860 I got lucky because we were in YouTube jail very briefly,

00:05:17.240 but we're out of YouTube jail, so we're good to go.

00:05:20.480 Well, like I said, you're not doing your job unless you get banned by YouTube at least once.

00:05:25.020 Well done.

00:05:26.160 Absolutely.

00:05:26.980 Absolutely.

00:05:27.440 So what happened in the news this week, Aaron?

00:05:29.540 What are some items that kind of came up in your mind and what needs to happen?

00:05:34.140 Well, it was an interesting week.

00:05:37.020 You know, I mean, this session in the legislature has kind of come to a close.

00:05:41.020 so uh there's not not that stuff to watch anymore but i don't know if folks are familiar with the

00:05:46.060 little community in in the kootenays in british columbia uh called rossland i think it's technically

00:05:52.060 in the kootenays i'm not sure exactly where the boundary is there but uh the rossland mayor

00:05:58.380 by the name of kathy moore uh had to issue a full-scale apology and sort of prostrate herself

00:06:04.860 to the CBC for the crime of going down to the United States, Arizona, I think, to get vaccinated.

00:06:12.860 And you sort of dig into the story a little more. And it turns out that she is a dual citizen.

00:06:19.800 So is her husband. And they went down to Arizona, as I know some people have done,

00:06:26.880 and ended up getting herself a vaccination. And I guess that news got back up to

00:06:32.460 canada and i don't think it leaked out anywhere i think she told the entire city council that

00:06:37.680 she was going down and i don't know if she told them she was i don't think she was intending

00:06:42.220 necessarily to get a vaccine down there but she just happened to be down there and had been there

00:06:45.840 for a couple of weeks uh and so it was what was interesting to me about it was sort of how the cbc

00:06:53.140 uh you know dealt with this story so i yeah there's so thanks for putting that story up

00:07:00.040 so there's a picture of her and i listened to the interview that they did with her and it was just

00:07:05.160 this horrendous like 10 minute shaming episode where they just asked her the same questions

00:07:11.900 over and over again about you know whether she felt terrible for having gone down to the

00:07:15.420 u.s to get a vaccine and all this stuff and of course she was in full apology mode

00:07:19.880 uh and said you know it was a bad decision all this stuff i don't you know the reason why it

00:07:24.760 kind of struck me is i don't understand why people are angry about this are you angry because

00:07:29.220 she got a vaccine before you did i mean you know i mean like one of the biggest challenges we've had

00:07:35.560 in canada is not having enough vaccines for people i would have thought that you know most

00:07:40.240 people sort of under understanding supply limitations would have thought would have

00:07:43.600 concluded that if she had the opportunity to go down to the u.s and get a vaccine down there and 0.98

00:07:47.300 not pull down on our own domestic supply well all power to her and of course city councils and in 0.98

00:07:53.080 fact most of the provincial legislature and the federal government for that matter they've all

00:07:56.620 been doing their work remotely but i just you know i don't get this outrage over uh you know

00:08:04.820 somebody going down to to do this especially if she's a citizen so the cbc asked her all these

00:08:08.700 questions like you know do you feel like a real canadian and do you know like do you feel like

00:08:12.860 you betrayed everybody they then phoned every city councillor on the council in rossland to try

00:08:18.620 to get them to call for her resignation and they even i know uh there's another story here from

00:08:24.680 back in january earlier in the month where a fellow named bruno tasson who was the the mayor

00:08:31.080 of calcigar kind of did the i mean he didn't go to the states but back in back in december during

00:08:36.800 christmas i guess he he went off to uh to his cabin in the okanagan somewhere a couple hundred

00:08:41.920 miles away from calcigar you know i graduate from high school in in nelson so i i sort of have this

00:08:48.040 deep-seated inherent kind of uh dislike for castle guard i guess so you know my first thing was when

00:08:56.120 i heard the the mayor of castle guard gone gone to a to a cabin for christmas i thought well yeah

00:09:01.080 he's in castle guard i mean of course you're gonna go to a cabin anytime you can uh but he resigned

00:09:06.520 over all of the the hate that he got for having done this and it's i just it's i guess the reason

00:09:13.400 why these stories kind of strike me is it is just it's worrying to me the degree to which people are

00:09:18.200 kind of out for each other and especially mayors and city councillors i mean like these people

00:09:22.920 they're not they it's not a lucrative position in these small municipalities and the cbc of course

00:09:29.640 in the case of kathy moore and rosslin asked her over and over again are you going to do the same

00:09:32.760 thing that bruno tasson from kapsigar did are you gonna are you gonna step down and like i said they

00:09:37.080 phoned every single councillor on that on that town council to ask if they would call for her

00:09:42.200 her resignation to a counselor they all said nah she told us she was going and you know she's a

00:09:46.780 dual citizen we're not really that concerned about it uh you know maybe it wasn't politically astute

00:09:51.100 we know that there's a lot of a lot of folks in the community that are angry about it and maybe

00:09:54.940 we wouldn't have done it but nobody's calling for her for her resignation and and she had already

00:10:00.080 announced i guess she wasn't going to run again so there wasn't really much the cbc could milk

00:10:03.460 out of this but you can just see this effort by the cbc to really try to cast shame on people that

00:10:09.020 sort of step outside any of any part of what they consider to be the you know the norm and to really

00:10:16.500 try to make a story out of this at the expense of of an individual who really from my perspective

00:10:21.800 did nothing wrong i don't know i don't know what your take is on it or if you heard about this but

00:10:25.340 it just struck me as uh as as quite a story i think that there's two sides of this on the one

00:10:32.680 hand there's the question of of who's entitled to the jab or how long do you have to wait in line

00:10:37.720 And 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.

00:10:47.240 So 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.

00:10:55.560 So the only reason that people are upset about this, because people go for medical tourism all the time out of Canada.

00:11:01.580 They 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.

00:11:28.800 the point is that she has family there

00:11:31.220 she goes there she gets the jab

00:11:33.120 and she's already 0.98

00:11:34.940 in the United States she's a dual 0.95

00:11:37.240 citizen then she returns home

00:11:38.760 and it's no different than any other medical

00:11:41.100 procedure that you might have toured to the United States

00:11:43.160 for but because there's been so much

00:11:45.040 pent up angst around

00:11:46.780 the COVID and everything else

00:11:49.060 that's what I think it is it's a kind of

00:11:51.080 envy and jealousy

00:11:53.200 surrounding this issue

00:11:54.960 so that would be where I think that comes from and I think

00:11:57.240 she was right to not resign in so far that uh you know she had she had told people beforehand or at

00:12:04.860 least her close circle what was going on um i i don't know i don't know if you're really going

00:12:10.340 to have a leg to stand on there you can do outrage for outrage sake but if she holds on long enough

00:12:14.800 uh the outrage machine will move on i think yeah and again i mean she's you know like it's rossland 0.56

00:12:21.860 so the vancouver machine that sort of churns through this stuff will will move on you're

00:12:27.220 absolutely correct she's not running again i mean she she did a good job in the interview i think

00:12:31.760 sort of answering these questions knowing that like most probably wouldn't even bother because

00:12:34.940 the cbc is obviously going to try to make an issue out of it but the bigger question for me is

00:12:38.840 you know like what's the motive here and you because you're starting to i think you're right

00:12:44.300 there's sort of jealousy in terms of some of the voters maybe they they would like to be able to

00:12:47.920 go down to the states to get to get vaccinated as well and and this is something that they they

00:12:52.600 couldn't do so i think there is sort of that jealousy motive if you think about it for two

00:12:55.940 seconds and you're worried that you know there might not be like if you really want to get

00:12:59.440 vaccinated and you're worried that there might not be a vaccine for you well i would be encouraging

00:13:03.200 people who have citizenship in the u.s they can go down there to to lessen the the demand on our

00:13:09.400 supply it's not costing us anything it's not costing them anything they they have to quarantine

00:13:13.660 like you know i mean they're following all the rules she didn't break any laws uh the americans

00:13:18.760 obviously let her in they kind of have to i mean she's a she's a citizen uh and you know the cbc

00:13:24.940 seemed to take particular issue that she like they were trying to make this case that she had 0.94

00:13:29.500 um she had sort of done her end run around some of the restrictions because she drove instead of

00:13:34.600 flu and it's not quite as restrictive when you drive instead of flying it was just i think what's

00:13:39.360 behind it is it you know we're seeing some of this in the states and i know some american commentators

00:13:43.280 are starting to pick up on it that in some jurisdictions there's this real effort to hold

00:13:48.080 on to the restrictions even though they're not necessarily necessary anymore given that uh you

00:13:54.000 know a high portion of the population is starting to get through the vaccination process and so in

00:13:57.840 some jurisdictions in the states for instance where you know like they're starting to reach

00:14:02.720 some significant what you might refer to as herd immunity levels where upwards of 50 of the local

00:14:08.560 population has been vaccinated already with both shots and they're still requiring them to wear

00:14:13.620 masks everywhere and and actually defying cdc uh i don't want to say orders but recommendations

00:14:20.780 to start opening businesses and stuff up i mean this is ridiculous and so what's the motivation

00:14:25.260 behind that it's interesting question is something i think people need to need to really examine and

00:14:29.680 i think it is there is a political class and it's generally the professional managerial class or the

00:14:34.480 PMC, as we like to rail against, who love these kind of restriction scenarios where they have

00:14:40.860 power, especially if they're in government. And if you're a government that has an election coming

00:14:47.840 up, or if you've got a number of other issues, which people are critical of, especially, you

00:14:53.640 know, I'm looking just directly east of us to Alberta, where the Premier there has a number

00:14:59.240 of concerns, not just with the opposition, some would arguably say even more so with his own

00:15:03.740 caucus and the same things are going on over there where there's this you know this real effort to

00:15:08.300 try to try to crack down and and lengthen restrictions uh now in alberta i mean they've

00:15:13.660 got a high high case count in alberta i mean that you know the numbers don't lie uh in that respect

00:15:18.480 maybe they do to a certain extent i don't know but uh here in bc i mean we just had five like

00:15:23.000 the trend is going down but dr bonnie henry is sort of alluding that some of the restrictions

00:15:28.440 are probably going to be a bit longer than than people are accustomed to and so other commentators

00:15:32.980 have have opined of course as we get into the summer and people are watching on television

00:15:37.860 a number of these big sports events where uh stadiums are filled just to the south of us

00:15:43.640 there's going to be a few questions going to be asked a you know why are we so far behind here

00:15:47.260 in canada but b if our numbers are declining uh and and our vaccine like we've vaccinated already

00:15:52.940 at least with our first shot about a third of the province in british columbia i think it's just

00:15:57.020 under two million people uh who have received at least their first vaccination i think uh almost

00:16:01.740 100 000 people have already received their second vaccination and so the longer we get into the

00:16:06.460 summer now if the restrictions don't start coming off people are really going to start to ask some

00:16:11.100 legitimate questions i think like you know what's the point of getting vaccinated if if our life

00:16:15.900 doesn't change and what like what's really behind all of these restrictions and it's something that

00:16:20.620 we have to be uh you know as voters i think we have to we we have to strike the balance on in

00:16:25.660 terms of holding our government to account because governments of any stripe as as you and i both

00:16:29.740 know and the western standard is clearly aware of governments of all stripe if you give them a bit

00:16:34.800 of power they don't like to give it up and and especially in bc if you've got a number of other

00:16:39.540 issues that potentially could be criticized i know uh you know if you're on the if you're on

00:16:44.520 the left generally at least you know not not my idea of the left but if you're on the left generally

00:16:48.620 you're unhappy about the decision to go ahead with site c uh if if you're on the right although i

00:16:53.840 would i would join my friends on the right in this criticism if you're concerned about the finances

00:16:57.700 of the province uh if you've been concerned about what's coming out of the ministry of finance

00:17:01.240 lately uh you know if you're that government you're facing those kind of criticisms uh you

00:17:08.100 probably don't want you're not keen to see the whole covid thing go away because it's a great

00:17:13.420 uh boogeyman it's it's a great place to to blame everything and once you lose that well you start

00:17:20.500 you have to start answering real questions and you don't have that that thing to blame things

00:17:25.600 on anymore so i think that's fundamentally what's behind it and the cbc of course which is you know

00:17:30.300 from my perspective generally the propaganda outlet for the liberal party uh federally they

00:17:35.280 you know they're going to play this game too and so it was it was it was really uh

00:17:40.480 it didn't make me very comfortable to see this small town mayor somebody who who's not making

00:17:46.700 a lot of money doing this job i mean it's almost volunteer these jobs in fact over the last three

00:17:51.320 or four years we've had this this sort of uh almost a epidemic of mayors resigning before

00:17:58.400 their term is over because you know like why wouldn't they they they're not getting paid very

00:18:02.860 much to do this they get a lot of flack from the community it's a thankless job and then

00:18:06.020 you know after all you know you go down to visit your relatives and and you get vaccinated while

00:18:10.580 you're there in the states the next thing you know you get the cbc phoning you up asking you

00:18:14.280 like when are you going to resign because the guy in castle guard didn't don't you feel terrible

00:18:17.600 it's just you know i mean it's uh it's it's a terrible thing

00:18:21.840 so that's that's that's the big news from the town of rossland when we're going through the

00:18:28.620 news stories i like to uh try to focus outside of the vancouver because there's there's there's so

00:18:33.900 many uh outlets that are covering that and only that but uh it's not every day rossland gets into

00:18:38.960 the news eh no it's not every day and i think that the other way of looking at it is just just

00:18:44.940 to your point of of there being this this tenacity in the media and that sort of thing to try and

00:18:51.000 tear anybody down even people who aren't very powerful people who the mayor of rossland is not

00:18:56.540 anybody who's going to be you know they're not calling the shots for the rest of the province

00:19:00.640 they're not calling the shots of the region they're barely calling the shots of their town

00:19:03.460 and i with all due respect i mean it they're just but they're just one actor right the chamber of

00:19:09.580 commerce for rosslyn has almost as much authority as she does so it's i think that it's it's really

00:19:15.480 sad to see that like the actual people who are getting away with well outright murder in some

00:19:19.840 cases but i mean the people who are getting away with you know putting people at disadvantage uh

00:19:23.860 not paying people proper wages or whatever that the powerful people who are actually harming people

00:19:28.640 in the underclass and and throughout all classes and and the environment or however you want to

00:19:32.780 square that those those people somehow always manage to dodge any kind of investigative journalism

00:19:37.940 any kind of scrutiny or a magnifying glass.

00:19:42.060 And it's these people who can be ground to powder

00:19:44.900 much more easily by the media machine

00:19:46.940 that are always targeted.

00:19:48.520 I don't know why, like to what end?

00:19:50.560 Like it makes no sense.

00:19:52.020 I don't think the mayor-

00:19:52.740 Well, what strikes me is that you don't see

00:19:54.180 working people outraged about this. 0.98

00:19:56.120 Like, you know, I mean, you don't see working class folks

00:19:58.840 who are going to work every day, 1.00

00:20:00.440 pounding the table about the mayor of Rossland

00:20:02.460 or even the mayor of Calcigar.

00:20:04.120 It's generally people from the professional managerial class

00:20:06.860 who you know aren't having to come into contact with people every day they're they're the most

00:20:12.080 concerned like they've got the height the most heightened level of concern over covid and yes

00:20:15.660 and yet they're probably the most insulated from infection they're not essential workers most of

00:20:20.880 them have had no loss in pay they've been able to work from home uh without you know losing any work

00:20:26.060 and they don't have to get up every day and uh you know worry about whether they're going to be able

00:20:30.600 to breathe properly because their job requires some physical exertion it generally requires no

00:20:35.120 physical exertion in fact their biggest challenge is finding ways to get themselves out of their

00:20:39.000 chair you know every every half an hour so they don't have health risk associated with not moving

00:20:44.400 uh and and it's kind of you know others have opined this this isn't my this isn't my take

00:20:49.340 but it's an apt one i think that what we're witnessing is sort of like the first uprising

00:20:53.780 of the professional managerial class and the first instance of where you've got this class

00:20:59.260 of people who are demanding more restrictions not just on the rest of the populace but on

00:21:03.800 themselves as well because they're able to derive some level of power out of that that they don't

00:21:08.560 normally have over everyday working folks and so that's really you know fundamental and and look I

00:21:13.520 mean 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

00:21:18.780 anti-masker uh I haven't registered to get vax to get vaccinated yet but it's not because I'm

00:21:23.800 opposed to it it's because I'm I'm very low risk and I and I know they've got some supply issues

00:21:29.060 and i and i you know i'm willing to sort of hang out in my like i'm i'm technically part of the

00:21:34.180 professional managerial class as well which is why i've got some credibility in criticizing these

00:21:37.780 guys i'm one of these people that can work from home and doesn't suffer any loss of pay so i'm

00:21:42.420 more concerned about making sure that people that really need the vaccine can get it given that

00:21:45.860 we've got some some shortage issues here and yet even i can see that there's people that are trying

00:21:50.580 to gain and for for their own sort of personal power base and uh and it's concerning to me to

00:21:55.940 see organs like the cbc play into this but but of course they are they are literally the the

00:22:01.380 mouthpiece for the professional managerial class especially in british columbia so so so i don't

00:22:06.900 know if anybody else is defending kathy moore from rossland that poor mayor of rossland uh but but let 1.00

00:22:12.820 me let me plant the flag of defense for her i i don't think she did anything wrong i think she

00:22:18.100 handled the interview very well and it's too bad she's not running again she sounds like a strong

00:22:22.820 leader uh which is tough to find in some small some small towns where where they're not lucrative

00:22:27.540 positions no maybe she'll end up an mla or an mp for the region that would be good or at least

00:22:32.500 take a nomination the the only thing that kind of comes to my mind we'll get into this other news

00:22:37.700 stories in a moment here but but it's interesting that you've queued up something here i never

00:22:41.540 really thought of it that way the the revolt the revolt of the ruling class i mean i have a book

00:22:46.420 called the revolt of the elites it's by somebody out of the states but it strikes me that since

00:22:51.700 2001 where where we had of course a september 11th attack and of course that was a direct attack on

00:22:56.980 the professional managerial class because that's who was in those buildings that were attacked

00:23:01.300 it was their reaction their fear 2008 i mean they were able to underwrite themselves for the most

00:23:06.740 part so it was more uh people who were in lower classes that suffered from 2008 and now we're

00:23:12.900 into covet and so we've had you know once about every 10 years or so these major shifts in wealth

00:23:19.460 and power and decision making and the professional managerial class is getting more insulated all

00:23:25.580 the time and the working classes are getting more subjugated all the time in these things i i'd

00:23:30.780 never really thought about it that way but that's a very good way of putting it erin yeah the i mean

00:23:35.000 the only tweak to that and i think you're right the only tweak i'd make is that i i you know i'm

00:23:39.340 like i'm a unapologetic marxist i'm sure your viewers know i'm like i'm a flaming socialist

00:23:45.700 lefty and so i i give the red hair is there for a reason i differentiate between the ruling class

00:23:51.900 and the professional managerial class i see the professional managerial class is sort of like

00:23:55.280 you know to use the old sort of socialist language like the lapdogs of the ruling class basically so

00:23:59.920 they're they're they're care but but they're the ones that workers have to deal with every day

00:24:04.040 uh and they you know they're like the old mandarins right um from uh from ancient chinese

00:24:09.720 society they they don't necessarily have direct power but they exercise a lot of power through 0.88

00:24:13.920 their bureaucratic control uh and their positioning and and you know because of the way British

00:24:19.220 Columbia is geographically set up where you've got these high density areas crammed into the

00:24:23.400 southwest corner of the province namely Vancouver where you pretty much have to at the bare minimum

00:24:29.340 be a member of the of the PMC to be able to afford to live there workers don't really live in

00:24:34.220 Vancouver I mean some do there's still you there's still some working class families in like

00:24:38.620 East Vancouver because they you know their parents maybe bought a house in the 70s or something like

00:24:42.720 that for $60,000. But for the most part, they've long been chased out to Poco, Coquitlam, Langley,

00:24:50.320 way out into Abbotsford, et cetera. And that's why the number one highway is so plugged up all the

00:24:55.580 time every morning because it's the entire working class of the Lower Mainland essentially having to 0.89

00:25:00.660 drive into Vancouver every morning and then drive back out again. And so you get this PMC that they've

00:25:07.620 got condos in vancouver uh they've got a very insulated view of the world uh that doesn't

00:25:12.660 extend out beyond the boundaries they view even the neighboring municipalities within the lower 0.99

00:25:18.180 mainland as as suspicious and don't even we don't even want to talk about those those heathens out

00:25:22.740 in the interior and the rest of the province and they and they have this real paranoid uh i mean

00:25:28.980 i think they're they're worried about a whole bunch of things and covet is sort of this manifestation

00:25:33.300 and this outlet for them and and it and it manifests in these kind of ways where even when

00:25:38.500 the numbers start to show that we're making gains and starting to get past this thing uh and and and

00:25:43.540 we can take steps to start to restart the economy again so we can mitigate the damage that society

00:25:48.100 starts to experience because of the economic ramifications of shutting everything down

00:25:52.980 they don't like that because it's it's a sudden they like this new paradigm where everybody has

00:25:58.500 to you know do what they say uh and and take their advice and listen to them because if they don't

00:26:03.460 the consequences are well you're killing people you're uh and so i mean this was just a perfect

00:26:09.060 microcosm that sort of demonstrated this this divide in our province it's not just a bc this

00:26:13.620 is playing out all over it's exacerbated somewhat because of the rural urban divide in bc uh but

00:26:18.260 it's definitely on display here and so anyway more power to kathy moore i hope she uh i hope she keeps

00:26:23.060 trucking on maybe she'll reconsider uh whether she's gonna gonna run again uh but anyway let's

00:26:29.220 let's move on uh just because i'm going on too long here so i i did watch uh the proceedings in

00:26:35.060 the legislature last week as they were sitting and uh i can tell you that the the paid sick leave

00:26:41.460 issue uh related to covet is still one of the major things that they're debating in the in the

00:26:46.420 legislature we talked about this i think a couple weeks ago uh so the the bc federation of labor

00:26:52.260 we're going to have to stop introducing me as the former secretary of the secretary treasurer

00:26:56.020 of the bc federation labor was like three years ago i mean i you know we're gonna start talking

00:26:59.940 about describing me as like i don't know a local basement dweller or something like that but

00:27:04.580 i certainly don't i don't i don't represent them anymore but they you know since i was there they

00:27:08.420 come up with a campaign for paid sick leave it's fairly um uh predictable i think coming from a

00:27:14.740 central labor organization uh and it's it's i wouldn't say it's picked up any steam necessarily

00:27:20.020 within government because they don't they're they're definitely not looking like they're going

00:27:24.820 to uh come up with any sort of solution here uh to satisfy the the campaign uh but it's an

00:27:32.420 interesting uh debate because uh anybody if you ask the question you know should workers be out

00:27:40.020 of pocket um for time off because they have covid most people would probably say no they shouldn't

00:27:48.260 be out of pocket uh because the consequence of putting them out of pocket especially if they're

00:27:53.780 in low-income jobs is that they're not going to take themselves out of work if they're starting

00:27:58.820 to feel symptomatic and they're going to infect more people so so the argument goes like this

00:28:04.260 it's actually better for the business if uh businesses are required to pay uh sick leave

00:28:10.900 for people that have covet even even if it's not uh otherwise required under the employment

00:28:15.460 standards act the challenge for business owners of course especially during covid when when business

00:28:20.740 probably is in most sectors probably isn't as good as it has been is that this is a new expense that

00:28:25.780 they they haven't had to pay for before they certainly haven't budgeted for it and and the

00:28:30.740 ndp is trying to try to strike this balance between you know not allowing labor to be able to

00:28:37.140 say well you know the ndp is not not carrying through on on our issues but at the same time uh

00:28:43.380 And so they're trying to come up with some sort of a cookie, I think, to throw them.

00:28:47.700 But at the same time, they're trying very hard, I think, and intelligently so to not overburden small businesses.

00:28:54.000 They're already really struggling during a pandemic.

00:28:57.200 But what's so interesting about it is Shirley Bond, she's one of the MLAs here in Prince George.

00:29:03.680 She's also the interim leader for the B.C. Liberal Party.

00:29:07.100 And 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.

00:29:15.400 She'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.

00:29:21.220 And we'll talk about leadership in just a moment.

00:29:24.140 But, you know, she's sort of glommed on to this issue.

00:29:27.140 And 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.

00:29:35.160 uh but there's you know i think the challenge i think for for surely is that and it's not just

00:29:40.940 surely obviously it's the whole opposition and and the staff that are that are sort of putting

00:29:44.740 together the hit pieces for as as any opposition that's how an opposition works the challenge is

00:29:49.000 there i think they're they're trying to be a bit too clever by half here they're trying to criticize

00:29:52.460 the bc ndp for not having a paid sick leave plan but they have no intention they i mean they

00:29:57.500 wouldn't implement one either and in fact if you really you know if you listen to the second or

00:30:01.380 third intervention by Bond, you know, she very quickly gets away from the plight that working

00:30:07.440 folks are facing right now and gets it and really focuses on whether or not business folks can pay

00:30:13.040 for this and business owners can pay for it and really challenging the BCNDP to say, well, how do

00:30:19.000 you plan to pay for this? So on the one hand, they're saying to the BCNDP government, you know,

00:30:23.080 you're bad for not having a sick leave, a paid sick leave program for workers, but at the same

00:30:27.880 time you government needs to pay for it because employers can't pay for it so it betrays really

00:30:32.620 that the again that the bc liberals main concern is over is over employers rather than than working

00:30:39.000 folks um and but at the same time they're sort of asking for this while they're while they're

00:30:44.180 telling they can't do it i guess they're trying to trap the government into uh into this impossible

00:30:49.400 situation the labor minister has um i think done the best he can to try to strike a balance here

00:30:54.920 So 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.

00:31:10.860 my questions of course were well okay so that's law now is it retroactive because a third of the

00:31:17.820 province uh and probably half of the working for workforce has already been vaccinated so

00:31:23.660 you know all of these folks that took time off to go get to go get vaccinated for for their own good

00:31:28.240 and also presumably for the good of the business so they're not infecting co-workers uh are they

00:31:32.640 out of luck because because the bcndp government didn't get this in in place in time the other

00:31:37.280 thing he's doing is that you know I guess I guess labor has sort of come back and said well that's

00:31:42.000 great but that's not even close to what we're asking for we're asking for paid sick time not

00:31:45.940 just three hours to I mean three hours to go get vaccinated isn't even as much as you get to go

00:31:50.520 vote you get four hours to go vote you know uh and so and so what he's what he's responded with

00:31:55.700 is this proposal for a something vague about a maiden bc solution uh for a sick leave program

00:32:02.180 and there's there's some article I think from the global mail that uh that was talking about this

00:32:06.720 but again the same questions come to mind so when are you going to come up with this maiden maiden bc

00:32:12.040 sick leave program like and what's it going to be if it's not going to be paid sick leave

00:32:17.620 uh and and like isn't it going to be too late like like by by your own estimation we're already

00:32:24.100 sort of on the back back end of this thing numbers are starting to trend downwards unless we're

00:32:28.280 looking at a fourth wave i mean you're coming up with a plan that uh it doesn't help anybody

00:32:33.380 So 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.

00:32:49.760 and and and then hearing you know who knows a few weeks down the road or whenever the legislature

00:32:54.000 sits again and they pass this are we going to end up having to pay something we didn't budget

00:32:59.360 for all of a sudden by law and what's what's going to be the uh the ramifications for that

00:33:04.400 for the business so we'll see how this one plays out and i and i haven't seen whether this same call

00:33:09.360 is is is being made in other other jurisdictions i think the federal idp is calling for it federally

00:33:13.920 but i mean the federal government doesn't really doesn't really have jurisdiction to to mandate

00:33:18.560 this anyhow it's a provincial employment standards act uh and and and in case of

00:33:23.760 unionized environments it's a provincial labor code and it wouldn't apply to unionized environments

00:33:27.680 anyway necessarily unless it's in the collective agreement because just because you put it into law

00:33:32.640 unless you specifically uh impose it on everybody um you know you'd have to negotiate your collective

00:33:38.080 agreement so it's interesting stuff to see how this one plays out i think when it comes to sick

00:33:43.040 days and and the question of what's going to happen when it comes to covid the sick days

00:33:48.700 question for me is is kind of straightforward it's not fair for anybody to be out of pocket

00:33:53.120 if if what they're trying to do is stay stay home while they're symptomatic of something that that

00:33:58.320 resembles covid or is covid and so they take they take the time that needs to be paid for

00:34:04.980 that's not a question uh employers do need to pay for that or it needs to be paid for through some

00:34:09.600 kind of uh you know replacement system through the province so it's it's it's paid for by the

00:34:15.900 employer the employer takes it as a loss and writes it off against their taxes at the end of

00:34:19.880 the year and the province reimburses them they take a credit or something like that so that that

00:34:25.000 would be that would be probably i think the simplest policy solution but the deeper principle

00:34:29.960 still comes down to questions of sick leave and paid sick time and that sort of thing

00:34:34.140 is i mean we don't want to there's always this old problem of like do we want to incentivize

00:34:40.320 not working or getting paid for not working well i mean something that covet has displayed pretty

00:34:45.540 clearly is that actually it turns out that a lot of the productivity we thought we were getting is

00:34:50.280 is capable of being manufactured in the home so if you do have a job where you can do it remotely

00:34:55.620 why we're paying all this money on mortgages on on office buildings and all this cost of commuting

00:35:01.500 and everything else these the this is irrelevant if you have a hard line internet connection into

00:35:07.260 your house or apartment you can do it from home and guess what it cuts your commute time down

00:35:12.380 it cuts down on stress and actually if you have kids at home or whatever suddenly you can actually

00:35:17.180 attend to that and and you're not spending the same amount of money on child care uh it's a

00:35:21.740 different question for working class folks who have uh physical labor jobs and a different way

00:35:26.700 of doing things uh and that and those and those jobs need to be treated differently and i think

00:35:31.580 that if anything else what needs to happen is i'm not sure where paid sick leave needs to go

00:35:36.620 when it comes to more uh professional managerial class jobs most of them have it already but when

00:35:41.660 it comes to working class jobs working class people have a right to if they're ill not not 0.72

00:35:47.740 spread their illness and feel safe in their employment at home for as long as it takes to

00:35:53.500 recover from COVID? Well, I mean, people like me would argue that they should have that, right?

00:35:58.700 I mean, currently they don't, right? I mean, the majority of folks that are not in a union,

00:36:04.780 they get whatever sick leave is available in the Employment Standards Act, which isn't a lot, but

00:36:10.780 to be perfectly honest, like even when I used to work in construction on unionized construction

00:36:15.980 jobs, we didn't get a lot of sick leave. I mean, basically if you didn't work, you didn't get paid,

00:36:21.340 right so i mean i remember a couple of times um you know back when we used to when we used to

00:36:26.300 catch colds because we used to interact with people uh you know i'd be feeling sniffly one

00:36:30.700 morning or or just crappy or whatever and i'd phone in and say uh you know like uh you know

00:36:36.860 i'm not going to make it today this is back when i was roofing right i mean you know the foreman

00:36:40.860 would say to me just just come to work i mean you can sit on the corner of the roof and and be sick

00:36:44.380 i mean at least you're you're here getting paid being sick right i mean and and that's the kind

00:36:47.900 of culture that um that is engendered when when workers don't have sick leave uh now i don't think

00:36:53.580 i infected anybody because i literally would be in the corner on the corner of the roof somewhere

00:36:57.740 um but if you're in an office uh or if you're in a meat plant for instance um and i'm not just

00:37:04.700 talking about covid i'm talking about any kind of uh contagious illness i mean that's that's that's

00:37:09.580 why we used to always get so sick all the time you know and probably will again once once things

00:37:14.380 start to resume uh so it's it's interesting but what's some you know what again what what this is 0.80

00:37:20.620 an example of to me is how stupid it is for us to waste all of these this time and these resources

00:37:27.900 trying to means test various benefits for people when you know if we had just done what uh you know 0.98

00:37:34.780 some people in the states are talking about uh in in particular uh Andrew Yang who who ran for the

00:37:40.380 the democratic nomination, but also is now running for mayor of New York and is, you know, starting

00:37:45.140 to scare the pants off of a lot of the professional managerial class there, because it looks like he's

00:37:49.720 got some momentum. He's been talking about a universal basic income for a long time. And this

00:37:53.480 isn't a, you know, I mean, I'm a, like I said, I keep saying I'm a, I'm a socialistic minded person.

00:37:58.100 This isn't a socialistic idea. This comes from people like Milton Friedman, et cetera, and a

00:38:01.960 number of conservative economists. You know, let's get rid of all of the, the wasted bureaucracy

00:38:07.200 required to decide whether somebody qualifies for a benefit or not as long as you're a citizen

00:38:13.020 of British Columbia uh let's get and we can and the province can afford to do it let's give

00:38:19.120 everybody a a bc dividend based on the on the economic performance of the province you can call

00:38:24.940 it a ubi you can call it a people's dividend you can call it whatever you want but let's just make

00:38:29.440 sure that there's that base there that you know if the province is doing well then we as citizens

00:38:33.640 because we own the resources should also benefit uh from that in some regard and it lessens the

00:38:40.280 uh the requirement for things like welfare and all these other programs that that people have

00:38:45.160 to spend a lot of time trying to qualify for and it's it's cheaper for the taxpayer it's better for

00:38:49.960 the recipient and it's better for the economy because people have money to spend at small

00:38:53.320 businesses but yet again it doesn't matter you know whether you're a bc liberal or an ndp supporter

00:38:59.160 uh in the in the or a member in the legislature you're opposed to that kind of thing because

00:39:04.340 you're so stuck in this current paradigm that uh you know god forbid somebody who doesn't need

00:39:10.720 the five hundred dollars a month or the thousand or the two thousand dollars a month from a from

00:39:15.020 a dividend like this might get the money uh i mean it's just it's just ridiculous so instead

00:39:20.220 we're going to spend way more money trying to disqualify people from all these various

00:39:23.900 benefits that people can't even keep up with. It's just, I mean, there needs to be a simplification

00:39:29.700 of this. I personally think a UBI is the way to go. I know it's a controversial thing,

00:39:34.860 but this is another example of sort of the consequence of not having a system like that.

00:39:41.140 And I would agree on that now just quickly that, of course, with the universal basic income or

00:39:47.480 with the paid sick leave, the point is that it's all going to be too little too late. Things like

00:39:52.460 this should have been moved on very quickly and we're losing that opportunity so they were happy

00:39:57.180 to seize the power while they had it but did they use it for any good i don't think so yeah in the

00:40:01.800 case of covid you're absolutely right i think uh all of these things are going to be too little

00:40:05.080 too late but the point is like you know i i'm firmly in the belief that uh this isn't even

00:40:11.440 close to so the last time we're in a situation like this i you know i mean i think it was what

00:40:16.400 is it moderna is the one um uh vaccine company that that was trying to float the idea about two

00:40:22.040 three weeks ago that you know we're probably going to need like an annual or a biannual booster shot

00:40:27.640 on on this thing you know we may we may have to keep getting booster shots forever

00:40:31.880 um you know and you look at the financial statements of moderna it's a company that uh

00:40:35.960 has has had prior to the covet has had some significant financial difficulties and and

00:40:41.240 it would probably save them uh to get on this scheme where you know government's buying

00:40:47.480 these booster shots from them regularly i don't know if i don't think any of the other pharmaceutical

00:40:51.720 companies were saying this none of them none of them are quite in financial straits like i guess

00:40:55.800 moderna was so so there's definitely forces out there that you know are just looking to make a

00:41:01.080 buck off of this thing and there's there's politicians who really you know whether they

00:41:05.320 really understand it or not they really like the power that they get in these kind of scenarios

00:41:10.680 um anyway why don't we talk about the uh bc liberal leadership race a little bit

00:41:15.800 not a lot not a lot has happened uh in the last couple weeks but uh ellis ross i understand

00:41:24.360 formalized his announcement he sort of let the cat out of the bag i heard a rumor i haven't been

00:41:29.400 able to see it because i thought you were still under the twitter the uh youtube ban but i i heard

00:41:33.700 a rumor he might have appeared on this show recently he was on this show this week he was

00:41:38.380 on the show on tuesday so did he so he formalized he formalized his his announcement that he's

00:41:44.060 he's thrown in he's the first day yeah that's right to do that so the so the rest of them are

00:41:49.380 kind of you know staring at each other waiting to see who who announces next and it's funny like

00:41:57.720 you know you watch you watch these characters in the legislature and they're all kind of

00:42:01.480 trying to carve out an issue for themselves that they can get some sort of notoriety some of them

00:42:06.080 have uh name recognition issues i think one of the front runners uh at least from the perspective of

00:42:12.280 the governing party the bcndp gauged on gauge which i gauge by how worried they seem about them

00:42:17.620 or how much how much attack they sort of pile on them is this renee merrifield from i think she's

00:42:22.260 from colonna rookie mla um who seems to be getting a lot of uh a lot of time in question period so

00:42:29.960 she's she seems to be the one asking most of the questions that could be for a number of reasons

00:42:34.200 it could be that i don't know whoever's deciding on the opposition side who gets the the spotlight

00:42:39.060 in question period either really likes her more than the others or the others are out busy

00:42:43.540 fundraising which maybe is closer to the reality uh but it's what's surprising to me is that while

00:42:50.160 they're all sort of jockeying around playing games ellis ross from you know from skeena

00:42:55.500 just announces like he doesn't uh you know there's no games right he's just like yep i'm gonna run

00:43:01.860 here's what here's what i want to do and uh you know like he's not waiting around for all of the

00:43:08.480 high profile endorsements that everybody else is probably trying to put together so there's not

00:43:12.240 like it which is endearing to me that he doesn't seem to be the type of guy that's trying to put

00:43:16.880 together a roadshow kind of thing he's just a straight shooter yeah he's just doing he's just

00:43:21.760 busking on the on the street there you know just telling people how preaching preaching to the

00:43:26.320 preaching to the people i i really like having ellis on here he gives me honest uh feedback

00:43:31.280 about things he gives an honest take about stuff uh he's he's very clear he's his criticism of the

00:43:37.200 the government um when it comes to covet and that sort of thing is not just a bunch of talking

00:43:41.160 points there's some really intelligent insightful stuff about where the private sector might have

00:43:45.500 been more involved what about the taxation what about the increase in taxation what what are we

00:43:50.300 going to do to grow the economy what about domestic manufacturing i really appreciate

00:43:53.820 ellis's contributions here the other day uh apparently had a bike accident uh he had a fall

00:44:00.200 off his bike so so he posted a video there i've liked his page to follow him right he's got a

00:44:05.660 video up there of him all kind of like bandaged up and like just telling how it is like what

00:44:10.000 happened to him like it's just you know like it's just he's just a real person that's the thing it's

00:44:14.380 not all it's not all smoke and mirrors and and lights and cameras it's it's it's just an honest

00:44:19.800 guy running an honest campaign i really appreciate that yeah no it's uh that's my take on him as

00:44:25.640 well i'll have to go back and watch watch his appearance on this show uh you know i mean there's

00:44:30.160 a number of issues that i disagree with him on obviously but he i i said from the very beginning

00:44:34.820 i think he's actually the the bc liberals best bet at uh at pulling off a win i i don't think

00:44:40.300 anybody else with the exception of i don't know maybe todd stone uh from kamloops he's got some

00:44:44.880 cachet in the interior i i guess maryfield could make the claim as well of being from colonna

00:44:48.800 but it's it's it's very rare that you get a northern politician uh who who is able to pull

00:44:58.580 together a that kind of support base to be able to lead a major party and potentially become the

00:45:02.800 Premier of the province, not to mention the fact he'd be the first First Nations Premier of British

00:45:08.040 Columbia. I'm sure it would be, I'm sure it wouldn't be received well by the BC NDP that

00:45:14.020 the BC Liberals produced the first First Nations Premier of British Columbia, but that always kind 0.89

00:45:19.880 of seemed, I don't know, I mean, if you go back in the history of Canada, like all those kind of

00:45:23.340 diversity firsts always seem to come from more Conservative-ended parties, that's sort of the

00:45:27.020 history. The first woman Prime Minister, first woman Premier, I mean, none of them came from

00:45:31.540 the so-called socialist parties um so that's interesting it's the same thing even with

00:45:37.760 Diefenbaker's government I'm pretty sure that was the first uh Chinese member of parliament uh

00:45:42.560 representing uh what is now what is now Chinatown and East Hastings that area of Vancouver he was

00:45:48.180 the member elected there I recall yeah and so I mean that's an interesting development uh series

00:45:54.460 of developments just just in so much as it totally destroys this narrative on the left

00:45:58.400 that they're they're the they're the ones that usher in greater diversity of identity um it

00:46:05.440 just destroys that narrative and it's always been something that's brought me a bit of joy

00:46:09.120 uh so the other thing i appreciate about uh ellis ross um well first of all i mean you

00:46:15.940 referenced his bike accident i i i mean he i was looking at the time stamps on his tweets when he

00:46:21.400 announced these things he sort of made his announcement and then that he was running for

00:46:25.440 leader and then like within minutes he showed pictures of himself all beat up from his bike

00:46:30.880 accident so when i first saw it i was like oh my goodness i hope people are beating him up because

00:46:35.080 he announced that he was going to be leader but he just had an unfortunate bike accident so i hope

00:46:39.040 he gets well soon um and also i mean i i didn't say that again i don't want you to be the next

00:46:46.360 premier somebody just comes out of nowhere and speaking of uh uh folks that need to get well

00:46:52.880 soon uh um mike bernier out of the piece uh who's uh also people have speculated he may throw his

00:47:00.440 name in as a as a leadership contender he announced uh i think earlier this week that him and his

00:47:05.280 entire family have contracted covid so they're going into isolation so i mean that's not good

00:47:09.520 news hopefully they um uh they're able to recover quickly uh so i mean it's you know i mean that is

00:47:16.500 what it is the thing that really uh i appreciate about ellis ross i was going to say earlier

00:47:21.780 you know this you had Stuart on uh you're gonna have him on again today I don't know if he's

00:47:26.820 going to talk about the Ferry Creek uh standoff um just just uh southern Vancouver Island around

00:47:32.820 Port Renfrew there you've got the situation where there's you know a logging company trying to get

00:47:37.160 in to do do work that they've been contracted to do and you've got some protesters as Stuart I

00:47:42.840 think explained a couple weeks or a week or so ago trying to block access so there's basically

00:47:47.740 a blockade that's been set up and stuart had a or not stuart sorry but ellis ross had a very

00:47:54.020 interesting take on this that he posted yesterday i think i included the tweet there um if you can

00:47:59.340 post it but he compared it to the wet sweat and dispute over the the coastal gas link uh pipeline

00:48:06.560 in and folks we've talked about this in the past as well but people may remember uh earlier last

00:48:13.640 year prior to activists throwing debris onto train tracks across the country to try to stop this

00:48:21.040 um what it sort of sparked that was basically an rcmp incursion an armed rcmp force with sniper

00:48:28.980 rifles the whole bit into wet sweat and territory to tear down a blockade that had been erected by

00:48:34.740 a group of people that that identified more so with the hereditary leadership of the wet sweat

00:48:39.680 nation than the band council uh who were generally in in support of the project and had sort of

00:48:47.920 signed off on it with the provincial government and so it put the provincial government in this

00:48:51.040 position of having you know having to say that look we as far as we're concerned we had all the

00:48:57.260 the all the consultation had taken place with first nations and and basically they signed off

00:49:02.760 on it the difficult part is the interpretation over who holds jurisdiction over over traditional

00:49:07.540 treaty territory and over the tradition the entire nation because of course historians will recall

00:49:13.540 that when the indian act was set up it was the indian act that created bound councils in some

00:49:17.700 cases they were imposed ellis ross of course it tells has a different take on it in the case of

00:49:23.540 the heisland nation his his research uh into the history of the heisland nation suggests to him

00:49:28.900 that in fact the heisland nation had petitioned the federal government for a band council but of

00:49:33.780 course i think as i've said before you know it's it's unclear to me whether you know the petition

00:49:38.900 was made because they were really keen on having these ban council systems or whether you know it

00:49:43.780 was the only way to sort of access federal funds was to was to was to participate in in this scheme

00:49:49.700 but in any case the situation we're in now is that you know most interpretations i think within the

00:49:55.220 legal community of the of the landmark dogamick decision of i think 97 or 98 basically attributes

00:50:02.420 final authority over over treaty lands outside of the reservations to the traditional hereditary

00:50:08.340 not always hereditary but the traditional leadership sometimes elected sometimes

00:50:12.100 hereditary whereas the band council's jurisdiction is generally restricted to

00:50:16.740 to reserves which are quite small and i know i know a number of band counselors uh i think

00:50:21.460 vehemently disagree with that interpretation uh and that plays itself out in the court all the time

00:50:26.340 but what's happening in fairy creek is is very interesting as uh as alice ross has pointed out

00:50:32.100 out in his tweet here he's saying look like whatever the bc ndp government says about

00:50:36.640 reconciliation and and you know getting along better with first nations and restricting

00:50:41.240 respecting treaty rights it was it was john horgan and the bc ndp government they quietly

00:50:46.100 reached out to the rcmp and said hey can you come in here and you know clean this up and by the way

00:50:51.120 we're you know we're gonna we'll pay for it because it probably you know that kind of an

00:50:55.620 armed force wasn't in the regular rcmp budget and what was interesting to me is that like

00:51:01.160 you know people on the left were basically in favor of this and they fell into this old

00:51:06.760 old uh position i think of of ndp governments of of trying to attribute authority to the

00:51:14.120 band councils on on cases of resource development because band councils were generally more likely

00:51:20.340 to agree to it because they would sign some agreement revenue sharing etc whereas the

00:51:25.640 traditional leadership was usually more concerned about environmental concerns etc and so you so

00:51:30.760 So 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.

00:51:42.700 Now, 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.

00:52:09.020 uh i i just don't like it when the federal government gets invited in as an armed force

00:52:14.460 uh represented perhaps by the rcmp i would have much preferred it you know i prefer us to return

00:52:19.420 to uh to reinvigorate the provincial police force um but i think we have to guard our sort of like

00:52:26.620 our provincial sovereignty um in these in these regards and deal with it herself so i had kind of

00:52:32.060 a nuanced position on that uh and you could read ellis's tweet i think two ways you could either

00:52:37.740 say look like you know the end the ndp he's either just trying to showcase that the ndp uh was was

00:52:46.620 willing to send the rcmp in against first nations people out of one side of their mouth while on the

00:52:50.860 other side of their mouth they're they're yapping about reconciliation and how everything's you know

00:52:54.860 it's a new era of better relationship but i think what he's actually trying to say here uh and it'd

00:53:01.660 be good to ask him i suppose is you know why why isn't the ndp calling the rcmp and to clear these

00:53:07.340 protesters out the other interesting piece which you know makes the plot thick and even more of

00:53:11.840 course is that the band council uh and the band chief uh in that area issued a note um basically

00:53:20.500 asking the telling the protesters to take a hike uh telling them to and i think i think that letter

00:53:26.020 uh i also said to you as well yeah we'll bring it up just a moment so so the plot sort of thickens

00:53:33.900 But 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.

00:53:42.480 And it's starting to get it's starting to get pretty dicey there.

00:53:45.280 Of 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.

00:53:54.340 And 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.

00:54:03.900 And it looks like basically one of the loggers came after him, screaming, swearing, grabbed his phone, and then there's a big tussle.

00:54:10.420 And I don't know what really happened there, whether charges are going to be laid.

00:54:14.040 But 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.

00:54:27.680 Like, I always try to see, I mean, everything's so polarized right now.

00:54:31.140 always try my best to understand that as best i can why people are doing the things they they're

00:54:37.100 doing right i can understand why loggers are frustrated with protesters we're in the middle

00:54:42.480 of a pandemic it's not easy to get work right now these you know these guys got families to feed

00:54:46.380 and their employers are probably telling them all sorts of things about the motivations of people

00:54:51.860 that are they're stopping them from doing their work from the perspective of the protesters i mean

00:54:56.340 you know i'd like to think that they live there i'd like to think that they they feel some

00:55:00.920 ownership over the over the land i i don't know uh the fact that the band council has basically

00:55:07.140 condemned them uh suggests to me that they might they might not be from the area i don't know so

00:55:12.520 it'd be interesting to see how this stuff starts to play out but it is potentially you know i posed

00:55:18.720 this question to stewart parker in the past because he you know he's been around long enough to

00:55:22.300 to have known and witnessed in bc this real uh divide between sort of the ndp or or the more

00:55:30.620 socialistic uh activists in the province and the and the green party activists and sort of this

00:55:35.260 political split that that uh that stewart was very much involved in as as one of the first leaders

00:55:40.600 of the green party of british columbia uh but my question was you know are we going to start to see

00:55:46.100 this split start to re reemerge as as the ndp is uh you know generally in favor of these kind of

00:55:53.800 uh resource development projects uh and and greens generally are not because you know you go back to

00:55:59.580 the the 90s when this stuff was unfolding over clackwood sound it was tumultuous in british

00:56:05.320 columbia you know tens of thousands of people at the legislature literally storming the legislature

00:56:10.080 trying to get in um uh and and uh people chaining themselves to trees you might be a bit too young

00:56:16.640 to remember this kind of stuff um but in those days there wasn't there wasn't this same sort of

00:56:22.460 divide between at least that i could witness between first nations band councils who were

00:56:27.080 generally in favor of these resource projects and activists and or traditional hereditary

00:56:33.000 leadership of first nations who were generally opposed to resource projects so it's just another

00:56:37.420 example of how the old sort of left-right divide doesn't really doesn't exist anymore and this

00:56:42.980 again i mean the the ongoing theme on this stuff is you know you and i are constantly sort of

00:56:49.020 frustrated with the identitarians within the professional managerial class that have sort of

00:56:53.360 you know they've permeated everything and and they're fundamentally racist from my perspective

00:56:59.700 because they're the kind of people that think you know because this person is first nations

00:57:03.680 they're automatic they automatically think the way i think they're going to think that

00:57:06.920 they're automatically opposed to resource development uh and it leads me back to the

00:57:10.820 bc liberal leadership race with uh with the one candidate that's not getting a lot of attention

00:57:15.180 which is aaron gunn who's kind of an outsider within that whole milieu he's you know he's got

00:57:20.140 a big social media following uh but it's questionable yet is yet to be seen whether

00:57:25.040 he can translate that into uh memberships to be able to convince the existing party membership

00:57:30.980 of the bc liberals whether he he he can win but he's been running videos you know sort of

00:57:35.820 highlighting this divide in fact interviewing a number of prominent first nations leaders

00:57:40.240 etc in the province who are you know are absolutely frustrated with with these activists

00:57:46.220 who are generally sort of white liberal children of you know like basic for lack of a better term

00:57:53.920 rich well-off people who are who are coming to these areas protesting in the names in the name

00:57:59.740 of indigenous people i mean it just it just reminds me of of this incident i think it was late early

00:58:06.020 last year back in like january 2020 or something where this have you heard of this extinction

00:58:11.440 rebellion group um these these are the it's this group i think at it like there's they're in

00:58:18.080 vancouver they just took the a whole bunch of them jumped on the ferry a couple of weeks ago

00:58:21.680 who went to victoria uh in the middle of a pandemic like i you know uh to and i guess their

00:58:27.600 whole piece is you know they believe that like the world's going to end in 12 months or whatever it

00:58:32.640 is that you know the the most radical of the climate activists are telling us we're all going

00:58:37.760 to die in in in a few months because of the climate emergency and in fact i i know uh like

00:58:44.480 seth klein's written this book uh uh that's urging us i can't remember what it's called

00:58:48.560 but it's urging us to treat the climate emergency like like a war right so we have to we we have to

00:58:54.320 like gear up to fight this war against against the climate um and and these people have decided okay

00:59:00.720 so we're all going to be extinct so we we really have nothing to lose so we're just going to go

00:59:05.520 all i mean it's a real cult mentality anyway these jokers about 13 of them showed up i guess at

00:59:10.880 premier john horgan's house uh sometime last year said they were in in the they were they were doing

00:59:17.760 so in the name of indigenous rights etc the local first nations band sent out a letter asking them

00:59:24.480 to apologize for coming on their land without permission and protesting at the premier's house

00:59:30.080 i mean it's just it had to be the most embarrassing thing and and so i mean it's just quintessential

00:59:34.160 sort of bc politics i suppose but uh i thought a wonderful way to round out the the session here

00:59:41.520 absolutely well we've got steward in the wings and aaron i understand that you are on your way

00:59:48.040 uh working from home as you are part of the professional managerial class

00:59:52.580 uh so uh but we'll let you get to it well thanks again i love the show and uh

00:59:59.460 uh and it's always a pleasure absolutely we'll see you again next week aaron thank you you bet

01:00:06.240 well we're uh we're switching gears here we've got uh stuart parker on president of the los

01:00:13.420 altos institute who uh can now undo all of the left-wing damage from the pro development guy

01:00:19.620 uh and now bring us back into uh conservation from the left uh what what what what's on the

01:00:26.240 news today, Stuart? What's the big headline for today? Well, I actually think some good news

01:00:32.080 happened, and I'm pretty happy about it. Sorry about the echo, by the way. I've just moved into

01:00:36.780 this area, and this room is not padded enough. I mean, obviously, I need a completely padded room

01:00:42.980 to be truly successful, but I'm actually celebrating a little bit because we don't know

01:00:51.840 how the Bill Gates divorce fits into all this, but I am really excited that the U.S. government

01:00:59.040 is now backing an end to enforcing intellectual property rights for vaccines. I thought I would

01:01:05.900 actually come and say something good about the world, because I think intellectual property 0.99

01:01:11.980 rights are one of the stupidest, worst things that's happened to our society. And I, and I'm 0.90

01:01:22.080 really, it's nice to see people rising to the occasion for a change during COVID and having a

01:01:29.580 decent response. First, Melinda Gates by divorcing Bill Gates, perhaps in a matter not totally

01:01:36.640 unrelated to Gates's opposition to releasing the intellectual property rights for COVID vaccines.

01:01:44.840 But now we see the U.S. government taking a cue from the divorce and realizing that they don't

01:01:55.120 know which allies they're going to lose if they keep this regime going. Intellectual property

01:02:02.380 rights are fundamentally anti-work. And a lot of people think that things like vaccines need

01:02:13.360 intellectual property rights to be developed. But the reality is that most of the vaccines we've

01:02:17.860 developed were developed before intellectual property rights regimes that we have now were

01:02:23.040 enforced. And many of the early, you know, medical breakthroughs, even when there were

01:02:32.740 intellectual property rights, the creator of the vaccine or other invention simply gave those

01:02:41.740 rights away. They thought it was inappropriate. That's what Nikola Tesla did with alternating

01:02:47.500 current. That's why we don't have a power plant once every three blocks. It's because we used to 0.96

01:02:58.300 understand that if an idea is true, we don't own it. It's God's idea. That's what people believed

01:03:08.260 in the Middle Ages. The only ideas that people can own are lies. And so I'm glad to see that,

01:03:16.860 but I'm really hoping that it leads to a major reevaluation of what we're doing with these

01:03:23.700 intellectual property rights in other areas. I'm not saying all property rights are bad,

01:03:29.880 but I am saying that some property rights are silly and they get in the way.

01:03:37.780 I think that there's no small amount of questions around the issue of intellectual

01:03:45.400 property rights as well as well and patents in general this has always been kind of a problem

01:03:49.700 is that you work your life at whole at something how do you have a right to earn a living off of

01:03:55.260 it after you've managed to invent something well perhaps you do but even there that might not be

01:04:00.740 perpetual and certainly it shouldn't turn into a rentier system this seems to be the biggest problem

01:04:05.360 with with a lot of the issues we have today is that everything has become rentier we don't have

01:04:10.000 new development why don't you just why don't you just make a better economy where people can

01:04:15.520 participate in it and share things in it in a better way yeah and uh sanford very good point

01:04:22.580 tesla died broken alone is that fair no it's not but um he gave those intellectual property rights

01:04:31.820 away and i think that he died um you know what being broke is not the worst way to die

01:04:38.620 uh being uh unprincipled is the worst way to die uh being ungenerous is a bad way to die

01:04:47.520 i'd rather die broke than unprincipled and ungenerous so uh i think that's um uh you know

01:04:55.460 you look at also you look at an economy like india's uh one of the you know india has consistently

01:05:03.800 been a holdout on intellectual property rights it's one of the few common policies that narendra

01:05:09.480 modi carried on after the congress party stopped being the natural governing party and what does

01:05:15.480 that mean it means that people in india pay a tiny fraction for their prescription medications that

01:05:22.200 we do um it allows for um it's allowed for huge improvements in the indian economy because uh

01:05:33.480 everybody can get treated for common illnesses affordably um with um with these prescription

01:05:41.240 medications but it means that we have brutal trade barriers against india because they violate this

01:05:47.240 and so you try buying i mean india is the second largest english-speaking country on earth more

01:05:52.120 english speakers in india than well three times as many english speakers in india as canada

01:05:57.160 and they have a major english language publishing industry but we don't get to read that stuff

01:06:02.440 because crippling tariffs are placed on intellectual property that's generated in india

01:06:09.880 you try and buy a a good indian book on amazon you're going to pay 350 bucks for a 350 page book

01:06:17.240 even though it's being produced in India for a pittance.

01:06:21.720 So the thing is, a knowledge economy, a successful knowledge economy,

01:06:28.060 is an economy where knowledge moves fast and it goes everywhere.

01:06:33.360 When you hoard knowledge, it's like an economy based on hoarding anything else.

01:06:38.580 It moves around inefficiently and it benefits too few people.

01:06:44.340 And 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.

01:07:07.380 So 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.

01:07:23.820 I think one of the reasons India really stuck its foot in is that when Monsanto sequenced the genome for basmati rice, they patented it.

01:07:35.500 And India's like, no, you don't own the idea of all our rice that we spent 6,000 years carefully breeding. 0.52

01:07:44.700 That's insane. It's our rice.

01:07:48.020 And by the way, that's what cultural appropriation used to me. 0.75

01:07:52.040 Cultural appropriation was not Brown University students protesting the shawarma stand because they've discovered it's been run by a Mexican. 0.72

01:08:01.920 Cultural appropriation has nothing to do with that stay in your lane nonsense. 0.97

01:08:06.280 Cultural 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.

01:08:24.400 That was cultural appropriation.

01:08:28.060 It was about taking things that people as a culture had made together and stealing them.

01:08:33.560 um yeah and so i mean i find the current cultural appropriation discourse nutty but i think one of

01:08:40.900 the reasons we made a nutty new definition was so that we couldn't talk about how our intellectual

01:08:47.740 property rights regime actually runs and how much the person who owns the intellectual property

01:08:54.180 to a thing isn't necessarily even the inventor it's the guy who got to the office first

01:09:00.580 and that and that's just it that's the thing that becomes so questionable so quickly i mean it's the

01:09:07.100 thing that's happening with our real estate markets as well i so so i'm supposed to pay the

01:09:11.960 difference in the exorbitant cost of inflation that's inside of your home i'm not saying it

01:09:16.560 wasn't an investment for you but i just didn't happen to be born in 1970 so i didn't get into

01:09:21.960 the market when it was good now i have to pay the difference like well why don't i why don't you and

01:09:27.480 i just go make a deal somewhere else i'll pay you a reasonable price for it and if there needs to be

01:09:31.900 more than that i don't know um maybe there's some other arrangement that can be arranged but it this

01:09:37.060 this like this is not i remember when four hundred thousand dollars was a doctor's house like i don't

01:09:42.040 think a bc bungalow is worth four hundred thousand dollars in prince rich i'm sorry i don't know what

01:09:46.320 you've done to it i don't care how you renovated it four hundred thousand dollars a lot of money

01:09:50.240 for a bc bungalow and that's now looking low there's people asking 430 450 and 480 for something

01:09:56.520 that was built in 1960 with two by four walls. No, it's, it's crazy the way, um, uh, the way

01:10:04.180 real estate prices have, well, they've lifted off and people keep talking about, we've got to stop

01:10:09.640 all this real estate speculation. We need a better speculation tax. We need a graduated

01:10:14.980 speculation tax. This isn't speculation. This is a sure thing. Like speculation. I have a little

01:10:22.860 less problem with somebody making a big windfall if they're actually speculating, i.e. if they have

01:10:29.520 a chance to lose. If they're taking a risk, sure, people who take risks should get rewards.

01:10:37.880 But the BSE real estate market isn't risky. Your property isn't going to go down in value.

01:10:45.840 There isn't a chance you'll lose the property after you buy it. Those things aren't real.

01:10:51.960 you buy in and if the property prices even go down if the assessed value of your home goes down

01:10:58.560 people freak out it's like oh no i'm gonna have to pay less taxes next year but my my investment

01:11:06.340 has gone down maybe it'll take five years for me to make a hundred thousand dollars instead of two

01:11:12.680 years oh my goodness i might have to ride out a couple of years of mild depreciation this is not

01:11:19.780 speculation like in the 19th century when people were doing the original capitalism and like you

01:11:28.160 know children were stuffed in chimneys and all kinds of bad stuff was happening

01:11:32.100 one of the things that people you know they had these stories right the horatio alger stories

01:11:39.080 right where there'd be a character he'd be a working class guy with no money and

01:11:47.160 And 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.

01:12:07.100 you needed working hard and you needed an idea and you needed luck luck that third ingredient

01:12:15.740 which is the big break that all these novels are based on you look at a modern capitalist hero

01:12:22.480 novel like pursuit of happiness that they made into that will swift's myth movie 10 years ago

01:12:28.500 or whatever what's that movie about it's about the idea that anybody who works hard enough

01:12:33.820 will strike it rich. And that's nonsense. Most hardworking people won't strike it rich.

01:12:40.480 And so if you take extra risks, then I can see there being a moral logic to you getting a big

01:12:48.800 windfall. But we use terms now like secure investment climate. That's code for when

01:13:01.120 billionaires show up and invest and their bet doesn't work, the public has to bail them out

01:13:06.260 with our taxes. That's what secure investment climate means. It's like, you know what? I think

01:13:13.040 Jeff Bezos is okay. I think he could stand not to win every time he allegedly speculates.

01:13:20.800 And the other thing is, of course, you end up with a financial elite that are dumb 0.98

01:13:28.040 because they've rigged the game so much that they can't lose. That doesn't produce a competitive 0.98

01:13:35.300 intelligent elite. That produces an elite of inbred idiots who are drinking their own bath 1.00

01:13:41.660 water. That's what, you know, the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, all that was 1.00

01:13:47.060 supposed to get rid of. But instead, we have this idea that if people are already rich,

01:13:52.480 We can't possibly let them lose. I'll never forget Rachel Notley's secure investment climate speech

01:13:59.400 after she got into office about, well, what good are you? You know, this isn't a matter of selling

01:14:06.820 out to the oil industry. Medium-sized oil hated Rachel Notley. What she sold out to was the idea

01:14:14.780 that a billionaire should be rolling with loaded dice, that it's got to come up seven every time

01:14:21.800 or it's not fair to them.

01:14:26.160 Seven every time.

01:14:28.260 When it comes to the question of what to do with our elites

01:14:31.640 in any respect or anywhere in our country

01:14:34.980 or, for that matter, in the United States as well,

01:14:37.220 throughout the West, it really is this stratification.

01:14:41.180 People lost their children,

01:14:44.000 people who were the richest people in the world

01:14:45.900 through the late 19th century and into the early 20th,

01:14:48.560 they lost their children to childhood diseases.

01:14:50.760 and that would create empathy

01:14:52.460 and then they would build hospitals

01:14:54.380 and speaking of vaccines, they would invest

01:14:57.080 in the preventative measures that would help children

01:14:59.180 in the future, the working class children

01:15:00.720 they'd see children in the street who are malnourished 1.00

01:15:03.120 this would cause empathy, particularly in the wives 0.99

01:15:05.180 of oligarchs, and therefore the oligarch 1.00

01:15:07.380 would have to finally break down 0.99

01:15:08.920 and do something about child welfare

01:15:10.440 what has gone wrong here? Why is this

01:15:13.020 empathy evaporated?

01:15:14.940 Some of us conservatives argue it might be the big

01:15:17.240 state. Was the big state the reason?

01:15:19.120 or is there a different answer i'm not sure that the big states all to blame but what i will say

01:15:26.340 is that um um where this is why i'm up i'm not a marxist marxists are people who believe that

01:15:36.680 you should like have a revolution have the dictatorship of the proletariat the the you

01:15:41.740 know the state will wither blah blah blah all that doctrine marxians are people who read carl

01:15:47.560 Marx recognized that he nailed some ideas and used him as a theoretical tool. One of the tools

01:15:55.320 that Marx gave us and then didn't use himself, he said, there's always going to be a class conflict.

01:16:02.120 There's always going to be one class and another class will split off from it and they'll duke it

01:16:07.560 out. And then Marx said, but that's not going to happen this time. Well, that's the part where

01:16:12.280 Marx was wrong. His theory was more right than him. Because what I think has been happening is

01:16:19.560 that elites have been engaged in a culture war against each other. And Thomas Piketty finally

01:16:27.240 quantified it when he looked at the numbers in his book, Capital in the 21st Century.

01:16:34.600 And this is something that Glenn Greenwald, formerly of the Intercept, also noticed. He went,

01:16:40.040 you know what noam chomsky was right in the 20th century the north american elite pretend to fight

01:16:45.640 but they're actually all colluding well that stopped being true in the 70s and 80s what

01:16:51.720 happened was there was a real elite split and the irony is it's the elite split that created the

01:16:57.800 soviet union the split between the owner and the super manager or the commissar so we know what a

01:17:08.120 what a dictatorship run by commissars looks like we know what happens when the manager class kills

01:17:14.680 the owner and we're legitimately afraid of them lots of people who work for a company you know

01:17:20.200 you're out there working for can for jimmy pattison may not be exploiting you uh maybe 0.86

01:17:26.040 exploiting you and your labor but he's not the guy who's being a dick to you every day at work

01:17:32.120 that's your manager and people are legit mistrustful of their manager not because the

01:17:40.840 manager has the most power but because that manager is exercising petty authority over you

01:17:46.960 right now so what's happened is um and this gets back to bill gates one of the things about bill

01:17:54.920 gates steve jobs these computer guys they could have taken all their money from their corporation

01:18:00.880 in terms of shared dividends and capital gains.

01:18:04.780 But you'll notice that the modern CEO

01:18:07.140 likes having a huge salary check,

01:18:11.460 even if it screws them at tax time.

01:18:14.480 And the reason is that they want to say,

01:18:17.420 no, I'm the manager, I'm running all this.

01:18:20.760 And so you get two factions of,

01:18:25.120 you get these two factions,

01:18:27.320 the commissar class versus the owner class.

01:18:30.880 And these folks are duking it out. And the thing is, they're focused on each other.

01:18:37.160 They are not looking down at the people they're using as pawns in their war. Right.

01:18:43.420 We're out there duking it out and there's stupid culture wars every day. 1.00

01:18:48.080 You know, the owner class is really hoping we're going to fight the next election over the question of whether women have penises. 1.00

01:18:55.040 Right. That's if they could just make that be the election issue, the owner class would win. 1.00

01:19:00.880 If 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.

01:19:14.520 But 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.

01:19:26.400 Right. Republicans are with the owner class.

01:19:29.380 The Democrats are with the manager class and their vision is not really trained on us at all.

01:19:38.220 What? And a lot of their tactics involve declaring the non-personhood of the other side.

01:19:47.980 So they're also becoming less empathetic towards each other.

01:19:51.140 There is a great, great show that I strongly recommend people try and find on whatever streaming service they have called Succession.

01:20:00.820 It's a fictionalized version of Rupert Murdoch and his family.

01:20:08.400 And Brian Cox plays the Rupert Murdoch character absolutely brilliantly.

01:20:13.140 brilliantly but the best episode is where they're fox news and they're trying to buy

01:20:18.880 a liberal television network to add to their portfolio and the owner and the uh and so they 0.79

01:20:29.700 have to go and meet with these yankee uh over-educated folks um at their country retreat

01:20:40.280 and you really see that for the elites they've pulled so far apart culturally from each other 0.96

01:20:48.040 they can't even talk to each other anymore that's what you see on the floor of the american senate

01:20:53.880 that's why people like john mccain became obsolete there's no conversation to be had

01:20:59.720 anymore between these groups they have dug in and because of the climate event they're also

01:21:06.680 figuring a lot of people are going to die this century, and that raises the stakes as to who's

01:21:15.640 going to be on top when we squeeze through this thing. So, yeah, I think empathy is generally in

01:21:21.840 short supply, and one of the signs of it is when you hear about, you know, this sort of triggering

01:21:30.280 or content warning, all this stuff about, you know, how people have to feel safe, how we always

01:21:35.980 have to feel safe we can't make a remark or use a term that makes someone feel unsafe

01:21:40.100 saying things like and of course the worst thing you can say to someone to make them feel unsafe is

01:21:46.360 you know you don't really seem to be who you say you are and that's what freaks people out 0.94

01:21:54.760 because the manager class has decided that living in a fool's paradise is your right 0.97

01:22:02.000 and that if people don't pretend that the nonsense you say about yourself is true, 0.98

01:22:08.940 they're doing violence against you.

01:22:11.160 Well, there's a name for that alleged violence.

01:22:13.320 It's called narcissistic injury.

01:22:16.780 If you become enraged or despondent because someone says,

01:22:22.060 you know, you're not really acting like the person you said you were,

01:22:26.220 that's a sign you need to go to the doctor.

01:22:29.040 That's a sign you need a lot of time on a couch.

01:22:32.000 with a qualified professional but we have normalized that personality architecture

01:22:37.760 it is now our assumption that everyone is a clinical narcissist and when people start

01:22:44.800 treating you like you're a clinical narcissist then you start acting like one and i think that

01:22:50.800 is where a lot of the empathy drain is happening it's this combination of an elite split uh leavened

01:22:59.040 by normalizing clinical narcissism there's there's a few points in there i want to touch on i think

01:23:07.440 one of the things that you mentioned there that i think is very true is is that the elites are

01:23:12.640 pulling so far apart and people are pulling so far apart we forget that where the civil war

01:23:18.080 started for the united states was not uh on the firing of fort sumter it was actually in the u.s

01:23:24.000 senate floor when when a bill caused one senator to start caning another one into unconsciousness

01:23:30.360 i believe is what yes charles sumner uh yeah it was um uh yeah south carolina senator um yeah

01:23:39.400 it caused permanent head injury you wonder why sumner was interested in punishing the south

01:23:44.200 later uh that would be the headaches he had continuously for the rest of his life um yeah

01:23:50.380 It's a it's really important to recognize that we have seen parts of this movie before.

01:23:57.620 Maybe we should do something about it before we get to the next part.

01:24:02.820 You know, and I think this is reflected in our own interactions.

01:24:05.940 I 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.

01:24:16.680 and he was saying you know i think it's a real mistake that we're taking police liaison officers 0.54

01:24:23.700 out of our schools there are very few you know we're we're teaching this gender ideology

01:24:30.720 where we're telling boys they have to like cops and if we don't they're if they don't like cops 0.98

01:24:37.880 if they don't want to be cops we're going to start amputating parts of their bodies 0.50

01:24:41.900 but at the same time we're also saying cops are evil and they have to be out of the school and 0.86

01:24:48.360 he said well you know i've got two sons and you can't deliver them that one-two punch right you

01:24:53.880 can't say if if you don't like these people you're not a boy and then say these people are evil you're

01:25:00.880 not allowed to see them and he also said you know like cops also deal with inequalities of violent

01:25:09.240 coercive force like what if you abolish the police what is your answer to uh violence against women

01:25:16.620 what is your answer to violence against children uh and the response was that all kinds of

01:25:23.980 environmental activists uh unfriended him immediately there was no conversation to be

01:25:30.720 had it was like well you've crossed the line and now you're one of the evil people

01:25:34.660 and it was interesting it was funnily enough it was a communist party activist uh uh who said this

01:25:42.740 to me he said you know i actually think one of the big problems today is that we are too ideological

01:25:52.600 and too political in how we define our communities the healthy social communities should have a

01:26:00.000 diversity of political opinion there shouldn't be a set of things that you can't say in your

01:26:07.540 friend circle you should have a pluralistic friend circle in terms of like you know and

01:26:15.120 so many culture little subcultures have become ideological have become political

01:26:23.360 one of the reasons i keep playing dungeons and dragons is that it is one of the few

01:26:28.080 new hobbies that really polices the boundaries and said, you're not politicizing this space.

01:26:35.780 You know, we're going to sit down, uh, Republicans, Marxists, everybody, we're going to roll some

01:26:42.220 dice. They're going to have a good time. And that used to be lots of communities, but you know,

01:26:48.080 I have a friend who teaches yoga and the yoga community has split into warring factions along

01:26:55.380 political issues that have nothing to do with the practice of yoga and so it's weird to say

01:27:02.660 as a person who's been politically active my whole life one of the things that's wrong is there's too

01:27:07.980 much politics stirred into everything we have really got to take a step back and you know it

01:27:16.540 and the funny thing is of course it's the political agendas of the elites who've fallen

01:27:23.780 out with each other, that they're just trying to recapitulate in our communities, and we shouldn't

01:27:28.940 follow their lead. This is a bad moment for the elite consciousness. Oh, yeah, there's just one

01:27:34.680 other thing I wanted to mention before we completely get off that split elite. Why do we

01:27:39.560 know J.P. Morgan's name? Why is he famous? He was, for a brief time, the richest man in America,

01:27:46.380 but for most of the time, he was a leading public figure in America. He was not.

01:27:49.960 The reason we know his name is that every time the economy went into recession, when Morgan was a big owner, he organized the bailout.

01:28:03.140 The private sector companies, the big railway companies and the banks and those folks would get together and bail out the economy.

01:28:12.100 They would do stimulus spending.

01:28:14.540 They would start cutting checks.

01:28:16.680 And J.P. Morgan organized that.

01:28:18.620 Today, and then this thing happens in 1929, where J.P. Morgan's, you know, on his last legs, he's not the leader anymore.

01:28:30.840 The business community tries some sort of half-assed efforts to get out of the Depression, but the Depression is too deep.

01:28:37.380 And 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.

01:28:54.780 And so I guess I would add that as the third ingredient in what's gone wrong with the elite.

01:29:01.760 And 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.

01:29:14.360 It also brought us the expectation that the economy's winners can afford to sit back and let the state do their job.

01:29:24.780 And 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.

01:29:35.580 yeah this has been uh what what do we know about covid it's been you know a huge wealth transfer

01:29:42.520 upwards uh and uh you know it uh i think a lot of people felt that covid was going to be some

01:29:51.000 great opportunity to like reimagine our societies rather than just dig the hole deeper and faster

01:29:57.900 but i think uh with the exception of a few jurisdictions um there there wasn't that

01:30:07.180 leadership because the people who could have offered it were in no position to offer it

01:30:13.820 nope they weren't they weren't perhaps something then that we can kind of bring bring things home

01:30:18.780 a bit on is actually uh there were two things mentioned by aaron earlier in the program that

01:30:23.020 that I know you have strong opinions about.

01:30:25.100 You've rehearsed them a little bit before,

01:30:26.720 but it's always good to kind of look at them again in a new way.

01:30:30.480 And one of those is, of course, in no uncertain terms,

01:30:34.680 that while Aaron is in favor of the coastal and gas pipeline

01:30:39.400 and sightsee and all the rest of it,

01:30:40.840 he was very much not in favor of the RCMP being brought in

01:30:45.300 to break up the Wet'suwet'en tribes,

01:30:48.440 those protesters who were in solidarity with the hereditary chiefs

01:30:51.540 who are trying to make a point of what was happening in their territory.

01:30:55.460 The same thing going on right now in Ferry Creek, though,

01:30:58.060 somewhat in reverse, where we have green protesters.

01:31:01.160 There are people who are pro-logging environment,

01:31:03.880 trying to stop the logging trucks.

01:31:05.360 That's turning into physical altercations now,

01:31:07.640 and nobody really knows who's on side and who isn't.

01:31:10.780 I think maybe the simplest thing to say here,

01:31:13.460 just as a final comment before I hand it over to you,

01:31:15.460 is that I do think that the coercive power of the state

01:31:18.700 can be abused by anybody, right-wing or left-wing.

01:31:21.000 and one thing that was very odd to me and it was and we've talked about this a little bit before

01:31:24.680 too is that when i brought this up a year ago just before covid when my panel was meeting

01:31:28.760 the community radio station uh in person not just digitally or by phone uh it was the social

01:31:35.600 democrats that were the most in favor of bringing out the army they wanted the army and they wanted

01:31:40.560 the army now and we're gonna we're gonna send in the troops and we're gonna clear these people out

01:31:44.900 of the way i thought it was very odd it wasn't the right winger it was the the social democrat

01:31:48.800 who was in favor of this. Yeah. And I think there's a real problem that it doesn't even

01:31:54.080 extend to all protests. There's a made in BC problem. There's an especially bad way we do it

01:31:59.980 here. So the first thing is, as somebody way off on the far left, not the medium left or anything,

01:32:06.800 but in this day and age, I'm, you know, as far left as it gets, which, you know, for dead

01:32:12.680 communists would be a thing to mourn all by itself um what i would say is i generally think

01:32:20.820 that if you're rich enough to have a lot of stuff um you're probably rich enough to pay for guarding

01:32:28.400 it i'm not a big fan of using the resources of poor people to guard the things of rich people

01:32:35.140 And 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.

01:32:48.540 We have laws on the books that prohibit you from blocking a public roadway.

01:32:54.020 We have laws on the books that prohibit you from trespassing on private property or on certain forms of alienated public land.

01:33:03.460 So there are laws on the books that you can use to arrest logging road protesters.

01:33:10.000 Now, I was arrested twice in logging road blockades in the 90s.

01:33:15.180 And let me tell you, it was never even contemplated that those laws would be used to arrest me.

01:33:21.880 Never even considered.

01:33:23.400 because since the 1970s every time there's been a major land use conflict the company goes or the

01:33:32.940 company and the provincial government together go to the supreme court of british columbia

01:33:38.860 and they ask for a court injunction they ask for a court order to and court orders are supposed to

01:33:49.340 only apply to people whose names you know, right?

01:33:52.700 The court orders people to do things,

01:33:55.760 but we've bootstrapped court orders

01:33:58.000 in a really ugly way in this province

01:34:00.220 that is rare in the civilized world.

01:34:04.580 So I actually mocked this in,

01:34:09.340 so in 1997, they were gonna log the drinking watershed

01:34:12.780 of part of the Slocan Valley.

01:34:14.960 It was one of those brilliant government moves

01:34:17.560 was going to end up costing more money they were going to liquidate a small stand of trees it was

01:34:23.080 going to cost the government more money to actually put the road in auction the thing off

01:34:28.680 deal with us protesters then the value of the timber and then once the timber was gone it was

01:34:34.360 going to destroy a community's drinking water system they'd have to bring in chlorination and

01:34:38.920 all this new treatment stuff big hole in the budget so um they um the company had gone to

01:34:49.000 i think it was slow can forest products don't remember had gone to the supreme court and had

01:34:53.400 obtained an injunction against all the people that had been in the newspaper saying they were

01:34:59.320 going to do the blockade and then also against john doe jane doe and persons unknown so yes

01:35:08.760 that is what the end of all of these court injunctions say this is a really creepy thing

01:35:18.440 in our laws so nobody who blockades these roads goes to jail for blockading the road

01:35:25.800 they go to jail for violating an order of the court in which they're not named

01:35:32.420 So I sought and obtained standing as persons unknown.

01:35:39.780 Selwyn 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.

01:35:47.980 He 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.

01:35:54.760 But 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.

01:36:18.360 it's that people and one of the things about this is the only thing you're charged with is

01:36:22.840 contempt of court with contempt of court there's something called civil contempt of court where

01:36:28.600 you can receive a fine of up to um a fine of up to any amount of money the court chooses

01:36:34.280 and up to five years in jail there's an aggravated version of this under which i was charged where

01:36:40.920 you uh it's actually one of two offenses in canada where technically you can still get the death

01:36:45.240 penalty. It's mutiny and criminal contempt of court. So you can be fined any amount of money

01:36:52.580 and given any punishment the court deems fit. And that's because you're violating the authority of

01:37:00.680 the court itself. And this, of course, is supposed to be destructive of the law itself.

01:37:09.280 And what this means is you get extreme sentences, extreme behavior, extreme policing.

01:37:15.240 why don't we just use the laws for blocking public roads?

01:37:21.520 And you know what?

01:37:22.160 If the laws for blocking public roads

01:37:23.940 don't have severe enough punishments,

01:37:26.720 do the work.

01:37:28.500 Go and change the criminal code

01:37:31.540 and put in a mandatory minimum if that's what you want.

01:37:35.900 If you think blocking a public road

01:37:38.180 should have a minimum 30 days in jail, fine.

01:37:41.580 But get the approval of parliament.

01:37:44.020 get the approval of a legislature don't hand this to the bc supreme court over and over and over

01:37:52.400 again because of course the bc supreme court's experience of this is that um well their orders

01:37:58.140 are not respected by environmentalists that's like or anti-abortion activists being the other

01:38:04.440 group um there are lots of persons unknown who have been arrested at abortion clinics in the 80s

01:38:10.580 and the 90s. And the worst thing about it is that even though it can carry a custodial sentence in

01:38:18.560 years, you don't have a right to a jury trial. The other feature of contempt of court is because

01:38:27.380 it's an offense against the court, only the court can judge the offense. So you don't get a criminal

01:38:33.920 record. I can still cross the border and pass a criminal record check. But the flip side of this

01:38:39.160 is I never had a chance to go for jury nullification. I never had a chance to put my

01:38:44.400 case to my fellow citizens. So these blockades are messed up in so many ways. Now, to get to the

01:38:53.540 other point about the fact that there are now physical altercations on the road,

01:38:58.460 the left used to have, you know, kind of a pacifist consensus about our politics. 0.78

01:39:04.740 and there's a simple reason for that um the canadian left sucks at violence it has no

01:39:12.660 competence at it um i you had chris elston on this show i don't know whether you got to see 0.90

01:39:19.140 the video of like eight antifa trying to attack like a guy with no training in fighting and he's

01:39:25.080 like wearing this weird awkward sandwich board and somehow he fights off eight guys that's that's

01:39:32.180 the Canadian left trying to do a fistfight. Like, it's just a humiliation. And whether you read

01:39:38.000 von Klausowitz or whether you read Sun Tzu, one of the rules is don't escalate to something where

01:39:45.740 you're at a greater disadvantage. Stick to the peaceful protests. You're less bad at them.

01:39:53.200 If you want to escalate to violence, like, sure, those Trumpians doing the bumpkin push in D.C.

01:39:59.540 this january that was pretty humiliating but let me assure you our our weird shaman guy is not

01:40:09.020 going to handle himself nearly as well as the trump people's weird shaman guy like that guy

01:40:15.300 probably had a move or two our weird shaman guy has no moves so um this is this is a major problem

01:40:24.280 And there's a very simple reason for why things are circling the drain here. 0.65

01:40:29.620 It's that we've run out of Quakers. 0.99

01:40:32.700 The Quakers trained everybody in civil disobedience.

01:40:38.240 And 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.

01:40:52.280 reacting, all of this stuff. There's a discipline to it. But like so many of the great

01:41:01.540 left Protestant denominations, the Quakers have mostly died out. There aren't enough Quakers, 1.00

01:41:10.660 and the ones we have are too old. And so the tradition for how you were trained to do a 1.00

01:41:16.600 logging road blockade, no one has stepped into the breach to educate a new generation about

01:41:24.220 why we don't escalate and how we don't escalate. And so you then just get a lot of embarrassing

01:41:33.780 antics. You know, the next decade, I think before the fever breaks, we're going to see some

01:41:40.440 amazingly incompetent fighting on the news. And I'm sure we'll all have friends who are in those

01:41:50.620 fights on whose behalf we're wincing. Well, I never thought that I would link Quakerism to 0.62

01:41:59.240 blocking a logging road, but I now understand. And I miss the Quakers too. I really like Nixon

01:42:06.660 myself but that's a different point altogether yes the other kind of quaker or original original

01:42:13.860 nixon was a quaker it was only after he lost the 1960 election that he went on that weird tear i uh

01:42:21.780 i'm pretty happy with vice president nixon vice president nixon was one of the greatest vice

01:42:26.660 presidents america ever had president nixon didn't work out so well but uh you know at least he

01:42:33.620 created the epa before he was impeached that uh that was an achievement it is a weird fact that

01:42:42.260 the epa and the you know state park system the national parks were both created by republicans

01:42:47.580 it's a it's a bizarre fact well um if uh if folks would care to listen to one of my uh podcast

01:42:56.880 resources on Los Altos radio. I think they're actually rerunning it right now on CFUR at eight

01:43:04.500 o'clock on Friday nights. But anyway, we did a show, my friend Dan and I did a show looking at

01:43:13.760 this one play written in England in 1420 and how it was hugely prescient, predicted all kinds of

01:43:21.140 things about the world described the rise of capitalism. And one of the episodes is about

01:43:27.640 the creation of the national park system in the U.S. and how that worked. And it's important to

01:43:38.060 remember that the national park system originally was a money-making enterprise that was necessary

01:43:47.620 to fund putting a railroad over a mountain pass.

01:43:52.940 The government handouts,

01:43:55.060 we're not going to keep the train running over that pass

01:43:57.940 and keep the railway working.

01:44:01.580 And if you have no trees to cut down

01:44:03.620 and no minerals under the ground,

01:44:06.240 the only way the railway can make money

01:44:08.140 is by putting a fence around the trees

01:44:10.360 and turning them into a commodity,

01:44:12.980 turning standing on a glacier into a commodity

01:44:15.660 and putting really, really swanky hotels in those parks.

01:44:20.220 There's no moment Yellowstone National Park didn't have a swanky hotel.

01:44:24.800 Ditto Banff, ditto Jasper.

01:44:29.000 You know, and in many ways, if you have alpine areas,

01:44:33.220 the worst thing you can do to them is make them a park.

01:44:36.260 It will attract people who will disrupt the alpine area.

01:44:39.900 As long as an alpine area doesn't, it's alpine,

01:44:45.120 so there's no harvestable timber so unless there's no mineral is less as long as there's

01:44:50.720 no minerals underneath not putting a fence around it and not putting a name on it is the kindest

01:44:58.320 thing you can do to an alpine ecosystem putting a fence around it putting a name on it putting a

01:45:05.280 hotel in it is the way you maximize human impact on an alpine ecosystem so we have a lot of ice

01:45:13.520 and rock in this province and we have spent a fortune naming and commodifying that ice and rock

01:45:20.660 and uh those are expenditures we all could have done without i would rather we put fences around

01:45:28.160 things that need to be protected but one of the things that you know the uh that has been with

01:45:35.720 the environmental movement from the beginning we have to remember that the sierra club was created

01:45:41.480 by republicans um and railway entrepreneurs like that's what it was about um we've got this confused

01:45:51.960 idea that um that we don't know the difference between a thing that's protected for us and a

01:45:58.380 thing that's protected from us and some things do need to be protected from us and environmentalists

01:46:07.200 have no words for those things. It's going to be the job for some other movement to have a name

01:46:14.800 for things to protect from people. All we're doing now is debating, you know, which commercial

01:46:24.360 activities should be taking place on a piece of land, not whether commercial activities should

01:46:30.340 be taking place there. And of course, the other thing about the, one of the things that is amazing

01:46:37.860 about groups like the Wet'suwet'en, indigenous governments that survived the conquest,

01:46:46.000 the hereditary chiefs, they have to be able to turn on a dime in making allies. Like,

01:46:51.840 you think of all of these indigenous nations that were kicked off their land at gunpoint to create

01:46:58.460 parks and then you know because that's how yosemite park was created yosemite park the

01:47:04.760 first of the modern parks in america was made possible by a new invention in the 1850s

01:47:11.600 the machine gun that's what made yosemite park possible the ability to fire automatic weapons 0.76

01:47:19.760 at indigenous people because the people living in yosemite were they were not leaving and 1.00

01:47:27.080 automatic weapons had to be brought out but today of course we see indigenous leaders who are trying

01:47:33.720 to defend their territory happily signing deals with environmentalists as their situational allies

01:47:39.880 despite that history and it shows both a strategic acumen and a magnanimity now the other thing is

01:47:51.880 you know, we were talking about the Wet'suwet'en a little bit before, and one of the things that

01:47:57.000 was so frustrating to me was not just that, you know, the Wet'suwet'en were being attacked by the

01:48:05.480 cops, it was also that they were being trolled by their elected representatives. Now, Delgamuk,

01:48:13.800 the Supreme Court judgment that establishes free prior informed consent in 1997, who were the

01:48:21.240 the plaintiffs, the Gitsen and Wet Soaten. So the Supreme Court said, you have to negotiate

01:48:28.520 with the hereditary government. That is the part that does foreign policy. Now, 10 years ago,

01:48:36.820 what people would have said, what, you know, folks like the social democrats on your programs

01:48:42.380 would have said is, it is a shame that we have to negotiate with the hereditary chiefs when we

01:48:49.660 brought so many banned councils on side but instead what they said was what do you mean

01:48:58.060 there are hereditary chiefs they have no authority we've never heard of them why can't we just 0.90

01:49:06.540 it's like stop playing dumb that used to be like a the trolling used to be mainly a right-wing trick 0.94

01:49:14.140 but i think the worst thing about that conflict was watching the liberals and ndp trolling the 0.99

01:49:19.100 wet so it's pretending they didn't know what dalgamuk said and taking a ridiculous position

01:49:28.300 like saying well these band councils voted for it how are we to know it's like if you went to

01:49:35.020 the mayor of sarnia the mayor of belleville and the mayor of oshawa and you offer them

01:49:41.660 each a sack of cash going here we're going to buy you a new public swimming pool for your

01:49:47.660 municipality if you say nafta is bad um that doesn't repeal nafta you don't say

01:49:57.740 well i don't know what to do the canadian parliament has voted nafta through and it

01:50:02.780 achieved royal assent but the mayor of sarnia doesn't like it what a mystery i wonder whether

01:50:09.820 nafta's in effect like that's that's not how anything works ever you don't buy off a set of

01:50:16.860 municipal mayors and then announce that international treaties are void well actually

01:50:22.380 you do in one instance that's how the country of panama was created but with the exception of the

01:50:27.980 creation of panama that's generally a failed strategy and if you live in panama you might

01:50:34.780 think it's still a failed strategy because you sort of live in a failed state yeah with lots

01:50:40.780 of very big bulging uh bank accounts for some reason can't really figure that yeah funny that

01:50:48.140 i uh yeah no the idea that panama is accident for how to do foreign relations or how to settle

01:50:54.780 treaties is um it's a pretty dodgy proposition and the point is nobody believed it often you

01:51:01.420 know you get into these debates nowadays and people just start saying utter nonsense in order

01:51:06.460 to provoke you. And it's like, well, I'm not answering that. You don't believe you. So I'm

01:51:12.760 under no obligation to believe you. And that, of course, really does confuse the trolls. I have

01:51:21.040 gained no end of satisfaction of saying there's no way you could be as stupid as you seem. 1.00

01:51:26.520 Are you calling me stupid? No, I'm calling you the opposite. I'm calling you intelligent and 1.00

01:51:31.120 deceptive. And I think that's been very damaging to our public discourse as well to sort of rewind

01:51:38.420 back to that question of why we've all become such bad conversationalists and can't get along

01:51:43.600 at a barbecue anymore. Yeah. And it's, and, and just the kind of immediate, the immediate

01:51:49.700 gravitation into getting into the defensive position, into the kill, into the kill position

01:51:54.300 with one another. There's no, where's the rapopo? Like you can't fence, you can't fence if all you're

01:52:00.120 going to do is thrust that's not fencing no no it's it's pretty bad and you know it's funny

01:52:09.040 i was really on that track like i was getting pretty resentful of people who disagreed with me

01:52:14.140 and then i just sort of had this epiphany it's like you know what actually none of us have any

01:52:19.720 good choices every political party you end up working with fascists because fascists are in

01:52:25.200 every party now and the non-fascist majority are mostly angry and confused and i thought wait a

01:52:33.220 minute i too am angry and confused so like maybe we can be angry and confused together rather than

01:52:41.540 angry and confused at each other yeah well i think we've certainly we've gained rapport with one

01:52:47.320 another on that yeah but i think it is also okay to be confused like i'm i'm you know if you asked

01:52:58.680 me to if you gave me a list of organizations and asked me if they were good guys or bad guys i

01:53:04.660 i mostly wouldn't be able to answer i think we're all a little confused about who our friends are

01:53:11.060 right now i believe i believe one of your recent posts on facebook was uh i'm i'm tempted to make

01:53:16.780 my default response assume the worst yeah there's well there's a lot of so you know i i had to go

01:53:27.740 i thought of this when i was um in uh these negotiations with my former employer and

01:53:35.960 basically my former employer finally came out during the negotiations and said

01:53:41.380 actually we're not getting rid of him because he taught this one bad class we're getting rid

01:53:46.400 of him because of his political opinions. And for me, that was a great relief. I felt like the

01:53:52.000 world made more sense. But when they're saying like, yeah, you look like you were in really

01:53:57.900 rough shape. Do you know what you're doing? I go, no, I'm sorry. My memory conked out about five

01:54:02.540 hours before that. And they go, well, what's in that glass? And I said, I don't know. Assume the

01:54:07.120 worst. I don't know what's in the glass, but just assume the worst and then we'll move on.

01:54:11.300 because i think that often we're put in a defensive position and then we have to do a

01:54:21.620 staged retreat rather than just seeding the field rather than just saying hey i really screwed up

01:54:26.640 and i'm not even sure how badly but let's assume the worst and move on so in a way i'm trying to

01:54:34.060 use the expression not just to suggest that we're on like a pretty dark timeline right now i don't

01:54:40.700 think it's i don't think a lot of people say this is the darkest timeline i don't think this is the

01:54:45.740 darkest i think this is the dumbest probably but not the darkest uh and uh but we also have that

01:54:53.880 tendency to like litigate how bad things are to go well it's it's almost that bad but not quite 0.96

01:54:59.840 that bad it's like let's just admit it's really bad and move on these uh these these questions of

01:55:07.540 small degree are not particularly helpful they they truly aren't and and when we can act in

01:55:14.500 solidarity at least discuss things cordially and uh perhaps perhaps reach across the aisle then

01:55:20.020 then we have a way forward which is why uh we enjoy having you on here every week steward we

01:55:24.260 hope you do come back to get keep keep bricking our thursdays between you and aaron i think that

01:55:29.320 we cover a lot of important ground and we show that there is a place for uh for going across

01:55:35.260 the aisle and finding a way to to make bc and western canada hopefully all of canada a better

01:55:40.180 place well definitely i um i think that uh aaron is a great addition you know i learned a whole

01:55:48.060 bunch from him on uh uh the last time we had an extended time together i'm actually working on

01:55:54.760 writing up what he had to say about how um you know union leaders did not really think through

01:56:02.800 how harassment policies would affect solidarity and would affect, you know, the business they

01:56:09.620 have to do out of their offices. I think that you're not just putting people of the right

01:56:16.100 together with people of the left. With me and Aaron, right, you're dealing with the two faces

01:56:21.600 of the left that are equally alienated. There's, you know, that there's an industrial left and

01:56:32.400 environmental left and those we shouldn't be on different sides and it will be fun maybe next time

01:56:41.840 to have uh aaron and me duke it out over some uh over some climate stuff and uh folks on the right

01:56:49.280 can just uh pop some popcorn for that it's fun they're finally fighting each other

01:56:57.200 i'm thankful for as always stuart for your contributions here and uh we look forward

01:57:01.360 to seeing you again next week thanks all right thanks so much bye absolutely well that is the

01:57:08.880 end of our program uh for this week actually right because we do three days a week here tuesdays

01:57:14.400 wednesdays thursdays uh 9 to 11 pacific 10 to 12 mountain uh every day every those three days live

01:57:22.800 and uh we're thankful of course for all of your attentiveness through this time we're thankful

01:57:27.360 for the fans of the comments that we've had throughout the week again uh as always we put

01:57:31.800 up my uh email at the end there just to make sure that everybody knows that if you want to send a

01:57:36.800 comment you want to send a concern if there was something on the show that uh sparked your

01:57:40.600 interest you'd like to follow up on it there we have it and gita at western standard online just

01:57:46.440 my first initial my last name at western standard dot sorry western standard online.com and uh when

01:57:53.020 when we do that i mean just again send us anything you want let us know what you need and uh who

01:57:58.500 would you like on the show what topics would you like addressed are we still should we get back

01:58:02.280 onto the carbon tax train talk more about what's happening with aaron and the gang in ottawa that

01:58:06.500 just can't get anything right should we pivot to something else more british columbia centric

01:58:10.600 and uh try and figure out what's going on with the opioid crisis i i don't know the point is

01:58:14.880 that we need experts we need people brought onto the show i need guests i gotta fill six hours of

01:58:18.700 content a week and I'm just happy to talk to anybody as long as they can keep it you know

01:58:23.100 pretty kosher PG-13 level language and keep a smile on their face and give us some important

01:58:28.380 information I'm happy to have them on so do uh question you know send us any of your questions

01:58:34.020 send us your comments and do like and subscribe and share thank you so much for being with us

01:58:38.420 this was Mountain Standard Time and we'll see you again on Tuesday next week

Western Standard - May 07, 2021

Mountain Standard Time - May 6, 2020

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