Western Standard - August 14, 2025


Nova Scotia’s Forest Fire Rules： Hiking Banned, First Nations Exempt

Mentioned
Shakespeare
The EU's climate narrative — As scary as it sounds？ How Alberta teachers' strike may sway school board trustee election

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

178.6

Word count

1,172

Sentence count

99

Harmful content

Toxicity

8

sentences flagged

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we talk about the ridiculousness of the government's new ban on First Nations hiking and fishing in the woods, and why it's a good thing it's not a fire hazard. We also talk about how stupid governments are when it comes to safety.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 But what really just made this chef's kiss for me was when the Nova Scotia government created an exemption for First Nations.
00:00:08.160 So, you know, going for a hike in the forest, going fishing, these things could inadvertently start a forest fire.
00:00:18.560 But if you happen to belong to a First Nation, then the risk might not be so great.
00:00:25.480 I don't know. Is this the difference? I'm going to get in trouble on this one.
00:00:30.980 Is this the difference between an Indian fire and a white plant fire?
00:00:34.100 I don't know where to go with the answer with that one.
00:00:37.200 But I mean, they're inviting this kind of discussion because the absurdity of this.
00:00:40.760 They're just getting so bold and blatant and showing that this has absolutely nothing to do with the fire risk.
00:00:46.920 What's it about? What is it about then? I don't understand.
00:00:49.660 Because it's clearly not a fire risk.
00:00:50.900 It's control. I mean, I brought many, many safety guys to tears during my 20 years in the oil field.
00:00:57.900 You were the safety guy?
00:00:59.180 No, I was the surveyor who defied the safety guy who fought with the safety guy who would battle with them.
00:01:06.580 I like smart safety policies.
00:01:09.340 I like to see the guy who shows up in his pickup truck drunk, fired.
00:01:13.100 I like to see the guy who's blasting down the cut line on a quad with no helmet on and jumping off the stumps, disciplined. 0.99
00:01:19.180 I don't like the twits and morons, though, who start imposing stuff where there really wasn't a risk to begin with. 0.99
00:01:26.820 Like, for example, they started with ATV bans in the woods and things like that, chainsaws. 0.99
00:01:31.460 Okay, those are hot items that could start a fire and there could be a problem.
00:01:36.900 No problem.
00:01:37.660 But when you start to ban hikers, that's safety guys gone wild where they just go to the length of the absurd.
00:01:44.840 And then it also shows that they tend to be also the ones who are woke to the max as well.
00:01:49.840 Well, oh dear, we've got a First Nations play that's coming up and they're going to be very upset if we cancel this.
00:01:55.660 If there had been any other play, or heaven forbid, a Christian singer. 0.53
00:01:59.660 It was Shakespeare, actually.
00:02:01.040 Yes.
00:02:01.580 That's a separate discussion.
00:02:02.860 It was a digital interpretation of Shakespeare, which I think is cultural appropriation.
00:02:07.920 It is.
00:02:08.500 In the extreme.
00:02:09.400 Which I think most of us don't mind or care, but it is.
00:02:12.080 The irony is hilarious, though.
00:02:14.060 And they're just scared of canceling that to upset them.
00:02:16.280 It's that bizarre double standard.
00:02:18.060 There's no race less likely to light a fire than another. 1.00
00:02:22.380 Or if we wanted to dig down into some stats, we might find some stuff they really don't want to find out.
00:02:26.660 Oh, we're going to have to cap our spiciness right there. 0.99
00:02:29.200 Yeah.
00:02:30.260 But it's just bureaucrats gone wild and they've got the authority.
00:02:35.300 They enjoy using it. 0.98
00:02:36.500 And it's ridiculous. 1.00
00:02:37.860 And I'm glad this happened with this because it exposed just how stupid it is. 1.00
00:02:43.020 One more thing about that story. 1.00
00:02:44.800 There is now a snitch line.
00:02:46.740 Oh, yes.
00:02:47.380 Yeah.
00:02:47.520 Now, snitch line, that takes us back to COVID.
00:02:51.100 Yep.
00:02:51.660 And to your point about control, there is the thing that locks that into place.
00:03:02.600 It's when governments don't have an imagination, then they start restricting people.
00:03:08.840 It's simplistic.
00:03:10.020 They won't do the hard work of enforcement.
00:03:12.280 And it is hard work.
00:03:13.500 But they want you to become a partner with them in enforcement.
00:03:19.700 And it's not a way to build a society.
00:03:22.060 And I'm just amazed that people will even tolerate it for a moment.
00:03:25.940 Well, and real safety is difficult, but bans are easy.
00:03:29.100 Yeah.
00:03:29.480 You know, if, but it's funny that most often, at least we could do a bit of a cost benefit.
00:03:33.620 I mean, how many children die in swimming pools every year across the country?
00:03:36.220 A handful.
00:03:36.620 If we wanted to reduce it to zero, there's only one way.
00:03:40.300 You'd have to ban every swimming pool.
00:03:41.960 You'd make reasonable mitigations like white gardens.
00:03:44.480 Fencing around the pools, training, lots of things.
00:03:47.300 Trade-offs.
00:03:47.620 But you do have, we have accepted that as it sits right now, a number of children are going
00:03:53.200 to die in those swimming pools.
00:03:55.640 To be honest, I won't be shocked if it gets to a point where they start banning the bloody
00:03:59.080 things.
00:03:59.360 If you're going to ban people from walking in the woods, because that's the only way they 0.96
00:04:02.340 think they can reduce the human ability to light a fire to zero, as ridiculous as that
00:04:07.760 sounded 10 years ago today, apparently it's just a shrug of the shoulders.
00:04:10.500 Well, it'd be the same with the only way to eliminate auto accidents.
00:04:14.760 It's the ban.
00:04:15.320 Of course.
00:04:15.760 Of course, we've decided that that is not reasonable.
00:04:20.180 There's things we can do to mitigate things, but people are still dying every single day
00:04:25.220 in auto crashes.
00:04:26.960 I think this is actually, this kind of government overreach actually creates danger.
00:04:34.160 You know, I remember saying during COVID that I hope to God we don't actually get the big
00:04:40.120 one.
00:04:41.020 Like if we, if we got a real, you know, like one of, you know, one of these movies where
00:04:45.440 it's like, it's the black death and it's a genuine crisis, you know, I mean, a restriction 0.99
00:04:53.720 of your freedoms can in some circumstances be justified if the trade-offs are appropriate.
00:05:01.440 If you're not going intentionally too far, there is a circumstance under which lockdowns could
00:05:09.520 make sense, theoretically.
00:05:11.080 But the abuse of government power by virtually nearly every government around the world and
00:05:22.440 especially in Canada during COVID made sure that it destroyed our trust in institutions.
00:05:29.420 It destroyed social trust to the point where if we got the big one, if we got, you know, black 1.00
00:05:36.140 plague coming, um, so many people, uh, if it, if it happens within, I think 15 years of COVID
00:05:43.520 here, people are going to say, ah, you got, you got us last time.
00:05:47.800 Yeah.
00:05:47.820 We've been through this.
00:05:48.580 I'm not going.
00:05:49.240 Yes.
00:05:49.580 Yeah.
00:05:49.780 People are, people will not follow, uh, reasonable recommendations or reasonable restrictions.
00:05:55.340 Uh, you know, you do have to curtail some activities during a forest, uh, for high risk of forest
00:06:02.120 fire.
00:06:02.460 Like I ride my quad every single day around my own land here, but if we were under a fire
00:06:07.560 watch, I understand that, okay, maybe that could create a grass fire on my land.
00:06:11.560 You got a manifold outside, tall dry grass.
00:06:13.760 Okay.
00:06:14.060 It can happen.
00:06:15.160 It doesn't happen a lot, but it happens.
00:06:16.740 That would be a reasonable restriction.
00:06:18.320 But if the government's always, if the government's going around banning me from hiking or fishing,
00:06:23.800 clearly things that have no impact whatsoever, I'm less likely to trust the more reasonable
00:06:28.960 restriction that, Hey, right now you probably shouldn't ride your quad because it could cause
00:06:33.420 a spark.