The 1867 Project - Why Canada should be cherished
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Summary
Dr. Mark Mielke joins me to talk about his new book, Why Canada Should Be Cherished, Not C Canceled, and why he doesn t think Canada should be removed from the public eye.
Transcript
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Good day, Western Standard viewers. I'm Nigel Hannaford, opinion editor here at the Western Standard, an online publication.
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I have with me today Dr. Mark Mielke, who is the author of the 1867 project, just published, Why Canada Should Be Cherished, Not Canceled.
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Dr. Mielke is president of the Aristotle Foundation. He is also president of the Winston Churchill Society here in Calgary.
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And he is the author of six books, formerly, one which is very much on the public mind at the moment, The Victim Cult,
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in which he examines some of the trends in society that make life a little more difficult for all of us.
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And looking back over his history, I've got this whole bookshelf of Dr. Mielke's books.
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There's something about this which seems like it's a summation of a strain of thought that's been going on for more than 20 years.
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Why did you write this book at this time, Mark?
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Well, I think what's happening today, the best way to understand it, is when you hear people that want to cancel Canada,
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sometimes literally, right, they think Canada is a genocidal nation state that somehow shouldn't be cherished.
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Well, they're wrong on the first, and they're wrong on the second.
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And what's happening these days is akin to people who want to take down an oak tree.
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I love trees. One of my favorite trees is an oak tree.
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Why? Because it's massive. It has a great canopy. It shelters people below it.
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If I'd been under an oak tree in a canopy, it probably would have been sheltered from the hail.
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It takes a long time to build something successful.
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And in the Anglosphere, anyway, and increasingly other countries around the world that value freedom of speech,
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freedom of inquiry, capitalism, that sort of thing,
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So, like an acorn that becomes an oak tree, what do you do as it grows?
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Well, you make sure there's sunshine, which is kind of like freedom of expression.
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You need water and nutrients to help the tree along.
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You know, wind can help an oak tree, you know, cement itself in the ground, anchor itself.
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Well, we have people today, though, that will spot in history a limb on the oak tree and say,
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The fact that in Canada, 1867 or 1920, it wasn't perfect,
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doesn't mean you take down the project that was Canada then or now.
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So the problem today is we have people, though, that simplistically think that if something bad happened in history,
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Canada has no credibility, and that somehow we should, what, start from year zero?
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But that's the best way to explain it, is that some Canadians, not a majority,
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but they're influencing, I think, a great chunk of the population, think Canada isn't worth cherishing.
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So myself and 19 other authors in the 1867 project disagree and say,
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no, let's take another look at Canada in history and now,
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and how can we renew this wonderful country that we have going forward?
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So, Mark, in your book, you have got several chapters which I think are going to really surprise people
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because you're bucking the mainstream consensus.
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You are, for example, saying that Canada is not a systematically racist country.
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All right, that goes very much against the progressive narrative.
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Controversially, you're saying that the British Empire was a good thing.
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I personally see no reason to dispute that, but others do.
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And then, of course, you're saying, and I think this one must be generating a lot of heat for you,
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so that John A. MacDonald, he whose statue is routinely pulled down as a protest,
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actually saved more indigenous lives than any other prime minister.
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Well, we've got some very excellent authors in the 1867 project, right?
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And the authors you just mentioned now do a really great job of unpacking some of these modern-day claims,
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And some Canadians, most Canadians, I think, might have a sense that they're not getting the full history
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So what these authors do in the 1867 project is take these claims and unpack them.
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We hear that a lot these days, that Canada is an institutionally racist country.
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Systemic racism, institutional racism, a century ago in San Francisco looked like this.
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Whites wouldn't allow those of Chinese origin to enter their hospitals.
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The Chinese of San Francisco had to build their own hospital because the whites wouldn't let them in.
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If you don't allow Jews into university, or at least not to the proportion that they might enter based on test scores,
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But that's been illegal in Canada since at least the 1950s.
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Ontario passed laws against discriminating based on race and gender and ethnicity and hiring and accommodation in 1951, 1952.
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So let's not confuse what is institutional systemic prejudice then with the fact you can meet a bigot today.
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But a bigot around, you meet a bigot on the street, that doesn't mean Canada is an institutionally racist society.
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So, for example, when you compare incomes of whether it's males or females, what you find mostly is that if your ancestry is East Asian, for example,
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Guys with pale faces like you and me are in the middle.
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And, you know, if you're of, you know, some other varieties of the rainbow, you know, you'll come under the middle, right?
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But what Matthew does is he explains some things.
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If, for example, you're a Taiwanese-Canadian, you know, or Korean or Japanese, first of all, your average age is older.
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And if you're younger, say, as an Indigenous person, the average, you know, Indigenous population is much younger than, say, a Japanese-Canadian.
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Well, you can't blame stuff on racism that has to do with other factors.
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Taiwanese-Canadians are among the most highly educated Canadians.
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The more educated you are, the more money you make.
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So what Matthew Lau tries to do is unpack that.
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He does actually find systemic racism, but it's the kind of reverse racism today, which is justified by social justice activists.
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And they no longer look at the individual, like Martin Luther King, in character and merit.
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But they look at you as part of a collective that, you know, presumably, you, you know, your ancestors benefited from something 100 years ago.
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Now, Matthew is with the Fraser Institute, is he not?
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Well, he's a scholar there, and he's also, he writes in the Financial Post every week.
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Greg, citizen of the Métis Nation of Ontario, has an Indigenous, other Indigenous ancestry, French ancestry as well, Acadian ancestry.
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Greg Piasatsky, he's a Toronto lawyer, who writes that Johnny MacDonald saved more Indigenous lives than any other prime minister.
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So, for example, MacDonald, along with, you know, other colonials and British of the era, favored treaties.
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They didn't want the Canadian West settled before treaties were in place, because they didn't want to see what happened south of the border.
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Where there were Indian wars, and Indigenous folks in the United States suffered greatly, because settlers just came, didn't do treaties, just stole them, and murdered, in some cases, entire tribes.
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So, Johnny MacDonald was conscious of that, as was the colonial government of the day, pre- and post-Confederation.
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Part of the reason for its creation was to make sure the rule of law and order in the Canadian West existed.
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And again, this is a British inheritance, right, that we're not going to take territory without treaties, you know, and the Royal Proclamation of 1763 is an example of that thinking.
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So, Johnny MacDonald saved Indigenous lives because he wanted the rule of law, he wanted treaties, he wanted to defend the first settlers, so to speak, from later settlers.
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Much of the Indigenous population across Canada was inoculated against the smallpox virus.
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That's a MacDonald success, as well as the Liberal government before him.
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So, and then lastly, perhaps the most contentious part of this, is famine relief on the prairies that Johnny MacDonald instituted.
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There's a phrase from a critic of MacDonald, and Greg Piasatsky in this chapter references the book, where MacDonald talks about half rations for natives in Canada.
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There was a deal under a treaty, the federal government was obliged, rightly, to, you know, provide rations on reserves as the buffalo were disappearing.
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But MacDonald gets into trouble because he's battling the Liberal opposition in Parliament, which doesn't, which wants much less spent on Indigenous Canadians of the day.
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Saying, why are you spending all this money on Indians?
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This is the Liberal opposition, you know, vis-a-vis MacDonald.
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MacDonald defends his decision, says, no, we have to feed people.
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Now, we're going to provide half rations off reserve, but full rations on reserve because we're encouraging them to go to reserve.
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These days, we would just say, forget the deal, forget the treaties, just feed people wherever they are with full rations.
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What Greg tries to do, and the other authors in the 1867 project do, is provide context, history, what was happening at the time.
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So Greg concludes, and again, you're right, it's probably the most controversial chapter for some.
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Is that John A. MacDonald actually was a net benefit to Indigenous peoples, even though that's not how it's seen today.
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But as Greg writes in his chapter, you know, John A. MacDonald hasn't changed.
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The history of John A. MacDonald hasn't changed, but the perception of him has.
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And that's because Canadians no longer know their own history.
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I think we've actually had some of Greg's articles in the Western Standard in past months, so it's pleased to see his name in the book here.
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And, you know, I'll let you talk about the British Empire another time, but why do some, I don't think it's everybody by any means,
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but why do some Canadians think that Canada should be canceled and not celebrated?
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Well, we might have to bring in the British Empire to explain that.
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So again, there's a simplistic view of history that I think people have.
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But the British Empire, for example, and you know this, was the empire that abolished slavery around the world,
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or fought, you know, fought slavery around the world,
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and in most cases was able to abolish it in any territories they control.
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Why do people think Canada needs to be called canceled today?
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I think in part there's a couple of things going on there.
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Number one, we have utopians today that look to the past and go, well, it wasn't perfect.
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Therefore, we can't respect it or we can't celebrate it.
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And what I mean by utopians, though, is if you think about the 20th century,
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And Marxists, you know, were wrong about pretty much everything,
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the economy, human behavior, so on and so forth.
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But I suppose at least a Marxist could argue their utopia they were going to create was in the future.
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We have people today that look back in history, which by definition is closed.
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I think it should have been perfect, even though history contains imperfect human beings like today.
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And so they're very immodest because they can't conceive of how 100 years from now,
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someone may look at them or Nigel and Mark and say, what were you thinking?
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And 100 years from now, find something that we believe today to be accurate and think, no, you're way off base.
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Similarly, we have immodest people today, though, that can't conceive that they could be wrong about something.
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But they also look at history in very simplistic terms.
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You know, in the 1950s, with due respect to John Wayne, I wouldn't want to have been an indigenous person in one of his productions
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They were always, you know, the supportive role.
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You know, I think it fairly can be described as not exactly friendly, you know, and not an accurate portrayal, you know, and somewhat even racist.
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But that's flipped today, where indigenous good, colonial era bad.
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One of the things the British Empire had to deal with, and in British Columbia, where I'm from originally, in the mid-19th century,
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was slavery issues among the indigenous population.
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So Governor James Douglas, in the mid-19th century, has to buy slaves from some First Nations to free them
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because, you know, it's impossible, given the smallness of the British presence of the day,
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And that didn't really get abolished until the late 19th century.
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Now, I bring up the indigenous slavery in British Columbia, not to pick on indigenous folk,
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but to simply say slavery was a reality of human history.
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And if you simply look at history, you know, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, where the British did no wrong
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and everybody else was, you know, inferior or the reverse today,
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that's why the British Empire analyzed and it matter.
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And Chris Champion does another chapter in the 1867 project as well.
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But you have to look at history as the potential for good and evil in each one of our ancestors
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So the British gave us the rule of law, capitalism, the rights of women.
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These were ideas that, you know, can be lauded by anyone and should be kept, right?
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My background is German, but I wouldn't recommend that we take much from the Germans historically.
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So, look, I think the problem today is people are utopian.
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I think they have a very black and white, really shallow view of history,
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where they don't understand how to learn the right lessons from history.
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So I think that's what's led to some of our modern day disputes.
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Do you think we're having a good faith discussion with the people who you describe as utopians?
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Or is this actually a twisted narrative that they use in order to gain power,
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political power at the expense of people who they perceive to be in power at the moment?
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I do think people have some sincere ideas and wrong ideas about how to view Canadian history
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So as I've explained, I think they're wrong in terms of their view.
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But sure, I mean, power, you know, people in power sometimes, you know,
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and if you're convinced of something, you don't like to be contradicted.
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But that's precisely why we need to contradict them.
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I mean, look, the way forward, again, back to the oak tree analogy,
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If you want to, you know, if you want to prune the tree, you're not going to do it at 2 a.m. in the morning.
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You're going to do it, you know, the light of day.
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When there are problems in a country like Canada,
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the only way to correct those problems is to do some pruning in the light of free expression.
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That's why the first part of the 1867 project goes through cancel culture.
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And some of those examples in journalism, in politics, elsewhere,
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but also some of the core problems today where Bruce Party from Queen's University,
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the Toronto law, the Toronto University and the law professor at Queen's.
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Party argues that, you know, we've succumbed to kind of a new Marxism where everything is about power
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And the Marxists thought this about economics, but it's now morphed into these other spheres.
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And Party does a wonderful job of saying, listen, the Marxist and critical theory
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are at the root of some of these problems, where they think there's no objective reality.
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And that's why you can have woke folk today decide that, you know, nothing matters.
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If they lose power and some actual fascist power takes power one day,
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they will regret kind of lobbying for the look at all of us through only the power lens.
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In the saddle today and under the horse's heels tomorrow.
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Now, it would be very easy to make this a depressing book.
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And yet I see that towards the end, you throw out some hopeful signs.
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The last third of the 1867 project, available on Amazon, I should probably promote that,
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So we've got one author from Goa, India, an entrepreneur, Garev Jaswell.
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He says, why are you Canadians beating up yourself?
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And we've got other immigrant stories, actually, in the book as well.
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Rima Azar, who came from Lebanon, who said, don't focus on identity politics,
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So in the last part of the book, though, we do go into looking at how Canada has been successful
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And oddly enough, you know who was good at understanding the why was Pierre Trudeau.
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All his faults, Pierre Trudeau understood that you need to focus on the individual.
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And he would disagree with his son's identity politics fascination today.
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Pierre Trudeau said, and I'm paraphrasing here, that your rights precede the state.
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You lend them to the state to do some things, you know, collect tax and do things you think
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Your rights precede the state, said Pierre Trudeau, battling ethno-nationalist separatists
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This is where we get the quote from in the book.
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And Van Bikachala, a friend of mine, and I author a chapter.
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But the basic gist of both chapters is let's not divide on identities in Canada.
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That's a recipe for disaster because no one can change their color, their ethnicity, where
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Let's unite around laudable ideas, the worth of the individual, putting the individual at
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the center of law and policy, which means no discrimination pro or against or skin color
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on a job application or a grant from the federal government.
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Let's unite around those laudable ideas or the rights of women, right, which took a long
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time to get to in the world and in many places are still not recognized.
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Let's unite around free and open markets and free expression, right?
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Those are the best past or flourish in the future.
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If you get people to unite around, I think people are always going to be tribal, Nigel.
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But you don't want them to be tribal on identities.
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You don't want them to be tribal on, you know, color because that can't change.
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You want them to be tribal in a good sense and unite around good ideas, laudable ideas.
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If we divide based on identities, then we're hooped.
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And we become like every other country or civilization in history, which for the most part, most people
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in history have been tribal, and they will say, you're in the wrong group, I'm in the
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right group, I win, you don't, I will crush you.
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That's tribalism, at least attached to identities.
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It took the conception of the individual in Western Judeo-Christian thought.
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It took centuries to get to the place where we gave individuals the rights they deserve,
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whether they're indigenous or women or minorities.
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So the last part of the book is really trying to remind Canadians of this laudable history
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you have, and in fact, that showed up in the 19th century.
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It wasn't like Johnny MacDonald or Wilfred Laurier or British colonialists didn't value
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And in fact, there's a wonderful story that's not in the book, but I'll tell it.
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In 1858, black Californians, 30 black Californians moved to Victoria, and they loved the place.
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Because they're treated as equals pretty quickly.
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They can run for the city council, the school board.
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And they encountered a lot less prejudice in Victoria.
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In fact, they were welcomed by the archbishop, the local archbishop, and by the governor of
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So they wrote to their friends in California and said, come up here, because this is a tolerant
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They don't know that these ideas actually long predate us.
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And it's why Canada became the flourishing success story that it is, because we value
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There were diseased limbs on the tree of Canada, so to speak.
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So let's not add bad ideas or cancel Canada today because of mistakes in history or the
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fact we didn't fully arrive at some perfect nirvana.
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Myself and the other 19 authors would say yes, it is.
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Mark Milkey says Pierre Trudeau had some good ideas.
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Look, let me ask you a little bit about the Aristotle Foundation.
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We don't have a lot of time left, but quickly, what is the Aristotle Foundation?
00:21:25.100
Well, I've been thinking about this for 10 years because I thought there's some issues
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out there that deal with kind of core, again, you know, core ideas in Western civilization
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and the Anglosphere in particular, freedom of expression, right, or empiricism, the need
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to actually ground yourself in what works, in science, for example, that sort of thing.
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I've been thinking that as all the great work that other think tanks do and which I've
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been proud to be a part of, they ignored some of these cultural issues or foundational
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But the short way to put it is we founded the Aristotle Foundation to make you think.
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When people say Canada's institutionally racist, we publish a book saying, really?
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We want to make people think, in a good sense, and contribute to a thoughtful, reasonable society.
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We also want to get into some urban issues, right, the decline of cities, where there's
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So you can go on the website, aristotalfoundation.org.
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You can contribute, you can find out more about the organization.
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But I would say, really, the organization exists to kind of fill a gap in the think tank world
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And in fact, we want to reach 100,000 students with facts and informed history.
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Because I think when you introduce some history to the debate and policy debates, like I mentioned
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on how black Californians loved Victoria in 1858 of all times and places, that helps modify
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some of our maybe harsh rhetoric today, you know, on various sides that, you know, when
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you look in history, there's some good things that happen in history.
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And I think history, it's one of the things we want to use at the Aristotle Foundation
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to broaden the scope of what's being discussed and get people to think more.
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So the Aristotle Foundation, we created it to make people think.
00:23:18.100
Of all the people you could have chosen, why Aristotle?
00:23:27.720
He was a dead white male who, you know, held slaves, right?
00:23:29.980
Well, Aristotle, because if you go back to ancient Greece, it was in ancient Athens where,
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at least in the Western tradition, they first started debating democracy, an asient form
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They also asked questions, which we want to ask today and should ask.
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And we do ask, consciously or unconsciously, what does a good life look like?
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You know, also Aristotle wrote about politics, you know, and he wrote about friendship, right?
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So he wrote about things that concern us all and the family.
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And I would submit that a lot of the answers are not new either.
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So we named it after Aristotle because, you know, here's a fellow millennia ago and those
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that surrounded him in ancient Athens that started to ask the important questions.
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Mark, congratulations on establishing the foundation and upon this, the first production
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I will just remind you that to find out more about the Aristotle Foundation and no doubt
00:24:47.280
to order your copy of the book, go to aristotlefoundation.org.
00:24:59.640
Without the CSSA, our gun rights would have been taken long, long ago.
00:25:04.180
These guys are on the front lines helping to draft smart and intelligent firearms regulations
00:25:11.860
And more importantly, educating the public about how we keep guns out of the hands of the wrong