The Catastrophe of Canada | Rex Murphy | EP 227

But his relationship to the working people— the oil men, the loggers, the fishermen, the farmers, the service people, the truckers— he is an anathema to demand by the way he's hurt the reputation and the historical legacy of the party he represents. I'm not an NDP here, but I could respect and know what they did, and I admire them for that. Even the Communist Party of Canada announced yesterday that they weren't in favor of the Emergencies Act because they realized—well, they realized that that allows instantaneously for the demonization and the criminalization of anything like organized labor protests, of course.

Hello everyone, I'm here today with a man who needs no introduction to Canadians and increasingly less so to people watching an international audience—Mr. Rex Murphy, one of Canada’s most revered and able journalists. We're going to talk today about Canada and the Canadian government and try to get to the bottom of what's happening, insofar as the two of us can manage that. So I thought maybe, Rex, I’d start with just some notes that I had on the pandemic since it's in some ways at the bottom of current events in any case.

NPR announced on December 27th that Omicron could bring the worst surge of COVID yet in the U.S. and fast, but I was watching that, and that was after data had already come in from South Africa that was quite credible, suggesting that Omicron was much less deadly, although more transmissible than Delta. It appears now that it's perhaps 90 percent less so. The current data, insofar as you can trust it, suggests that vaccines are approximately 35 percent effective against Omicron infection and perhaps 70 percent against hospitalization. So that's the reality of the pandemic.

I'll add one more thing and then turn it over to you for a minute. That data has been making itself manifest over the last few months. Pandemic mandate restriction reductions have occurred in a variety of major countries, including Denmark, England, Sweden, Norway, Spain, and Italy— a relatively admirable set of countries, let’s point out. And then also in the last two weeks in Canada, in Saskatchewan, Alberta, Quebec, Ontario, and PEI. Yet our country is under the equivalent of— I think martial law is not too extreme a term— and we're in worse shape politically, perhaps, than we've ever been.

So you've had a vast experience watching the Canadian political scene forever. So what do you make of this?

Well, first of all, it’s very difficult to find a single sentence answer. They're not being killed. I've watched this stuff for what it's worth, me being the witness from the days back in the 1950s— I'm an ancient old bastard— when Joey Smallwood was, in many ways, a fairly tyrannical premier at the end of his days. I thought I learned then, as a teenager, what overreach was like and what, even in a minuscule circumstance like Newfoundland. It's not Russia or the United States, but nonetheless, when you get in charge, how over time you attenuate or you lose or you diminish the few noble impulses that you may have come in with and become completely obsessed with yourself.

To go right to your question, however, it really is very difficult. After two years and very sporadically effective measures—don't take the mass, they’ll hurt you, take the mass— ignoring the old age homes, the economic ruin that’s going on. After we go through two whole years of this, this third period— you mentioned the Omicron comes in, the information comes by— and as you point out, major and responsible countries, after the two years, realizing that, okay, we're into a milder circumstance, we cannot continue claustrophobically to restrict our citizens from their basic rights. They start to lift them. Serious countries start to lift the mandates.

At the tail end, also, as you mentioned, some of the provinces in Canada—and at this point, a single group, the truckers, who for two years were going around delivering food and being regarded as heroes. They live, as people have pointed out, solitary lives. They're alone in their trucks, but after two years, at the very, very end, a core of those truckers— and it could be from principles of civil liberties, it could be because they believe that they've already had COVID and therefore they haven’t in other words— there’s a whole host of rational reasons that some people would say, “No, I have occupation, and it's two years. All these things are going away,” and instead, they're threatened. Their livelihoods are threatened. Their actual livelihoods.

And then they make this point. They say to Ottawa, they say to their own politicians, “Why are you doing this? You know we have worked like others have not worked. We have worked as hard as the medical staff, we have worked as hard as the grocery clerks, and we are the people bringing you the food—and, by the way, supplies for the hospitals.” So of all the people to single out, the working-class trucker.

Then they go across Canada in the middle of the winter. There's a week's warning, and here's the key— at no point, at no point did any substantial authority, backbencher, minister, minister of finance, or prime minister send out either a delegation or himself and say, “Look, these guys and gals in these trucks are the heart and soul of this country. Come in and let’s have a chat. We're Canadians. We talk about things. We have prided ourselves ever so much that we're so polite and so compromising. We say sorry when someone else hits us.”

So where did the ethic, the intrinsic ethic of the Canadian temperament disappear? Instead of saying, “Oh my God, what a joy it would be to talk to someone who's not hidden in cabinets, to talk to someone who does a job who has kept society functioning.” If you guys have problems, I really want to speak to you because I'm your prime minister and I'm also the Prime Minister of Canada. But no talk. None at all.

Instead, this is the thing that really got my temper up. Instead, out of the blue, like some dark wizard, he comes down on them— they’re racists, they’re misogynists, they’re only a small fringe, but they’re taking up space and we can’t tolerate that. I do not know—I really do not know what was in his mind, what was in the minds of his superlative advisors, presuming that they have them. I’m also surprised that the Liberal caucus— liberalism is a word without a capital letter— many, many times. How come all those backbenchers, some of them from the Atlantic provinces who know the working class, who know fishermen and loggers and miners and oil workers and truckers, they're a class. Does no one stand up for them?

Then let the Prime Minister rail at them— and Mr. Singh saying that these are white supremacists and they’re calling Islam a disease. Whenever I hear the word “irresponsible” paused at the Ottawa protest, it turns me upside down.

One more final point, and I’ll shut up. When have you seen, when in America or in Canada, a two and a half week protest by BLM or Antifa or some environmental group and not a window smashed, not a police officer attacked, no burning of buildings, no shouting curse words at the police forces, no intimidation? This has been a classic Canadian protest in this sense that, A, it’s a working-class protest, so it’s not professional, and secondly, considering what’s at stake—livelihood restriction of civil liberties— they’ll prepare an inflammatory rhetoric from the Prime Minister.

The fact that the last two weeks have been as tranquil as they have—that’s a new bloom in the idea of Canadian temperament. Sorry to be so long.

You and I were told a couple of months ago that my advisers to high-level government officials said that the COVID policy was essentially being dictated by opinion polls, which is something we can get back to—this reliance by government leaders now on experts and on opinion polls—we’ll cover that. But we should also point out that although many countries in Europe had started to lift vaccine mandates and that had been lifted in many states in the U.S., none of that was occurring in Canada at all until the truckers started this protest.

Now these five provinces have started to lift their mandates and more are going to follow, and they aren’t claiming that that’s a consequence of the trucker protest. But the truth of the matter is that we know that this is being run by opinion polls, which is a terrible way to run a government. Nothing had changed before the truckers started to protest.

Let’s also point out that we have an 86 percent vaccination rate in Canada—that’s one dose vaccination, anyways—and that no one with any sense would ever think that it would be possible to push vaccine rates above approximately 90 percent because 10 percent of the population is not in the condition necessary even to comply, often voluntarily, with mandates. So it’s terrible naivety to assume that it can be pushed beyond that.

So let’s go through a couple of issues. I’ll just list them, and these are things we can discuss. Well, we want to figure out, why did the truckers get demonized and what are Canadians supposed to think about that? Especially because FINTRAC, which tracks financial transactions and is supposed to be taking care of such things as terrorist financing, has no evidence of suspicious transactions occurring in relationship to this protest. And that was documented by CTV, who is hardly—you could hardly accuse of being sympathetic to the truckers.

So there’s that. Then there’s just exactly what is the emergency here and why is it reasonable under any conditions whatsoever to consider this an emergency of such major proportions that our basic civil liberties have to be lifted?

Then the ability to freeze and seize bank accounts, which generates distrust in the banks. The precedent to define retroactive crime, because now funding a perfectly legal protest through legal means has been criminalized and associated with terrorism and organized crime and can be punished without trial by fiat—and that appears to be permanent.

Then we have the extension and redefinition of crime, because “mischief” has now been expanded as a category to arrest people without cause, and now you can aid and abet mischief. Then they compelled the tow truck operators to start operating, and Trudeau said they would get just compensation. And then you’ve been beating this drum for a long time. We’ve been governed essentially without Parliament for two years.

Then this is maybe—it’s very hard to say what the worst thing is that happened to Canada in the last two weeks, because six things are worse, and each of them should be fatal to the Trudeau government. But I think perhaps the worst was the decision to suspend Parliament on Friday from discussing the Emergency Act because of the action that was instituted by the police as a consequence of the Emergency Act.

So let’s start with—you talked about Trudeau’s state of mind with regards to the truckers. He’s accused the Conservatives of supporting the people who wave swastikas and tried to associate the truckers with Nazis and went after a Jewish Conservative MP and hasn’t apologized for that.

So do you think that Trudeau believes that the truckers are actually some kind of far-right mega movement? Or what? It just leaves me speechless on that one point. It is impossible to believe that he believes it. If you’ll have a thousand or two thousand or three thousand people, and there is a placard up, and the placard is not—sorry, you’ve been having to make this point—the placard that has the swastika on it, it’s a nasty thing, but it’s implying that the government is the bunch.

The news media and Trudeau take this idiot and his scribbled damn swastika and they tried to paint tens of thousands—because when these truckers came across Canada, every highway overpass and at least a third of the country is saying, “Thank God that someone is expressing something.” But the idea that the Conservatives are feeble and they haven’t been present enough—I could go on with them forever, but the idea that they’re Nazis, I mean this is not even grade six. This is ridiculous.

Oh, by the way, I have to—this one guy wearing a raccoon mask walking around with the Confederate flag— it was absurd. It has no consequence whatsoever. Well, in the truck, if you listen away—well, I don’t mean, there’s video evidence of that. I know that, but the news media sucked on that like they were a hungry babe. I mean it was so—

Let’s talk about the news media first; we might as well jump to that. Okay, so here’s the deal. Now, one of the ways that Mussolini defined fascism, which I think is quite interesting, is the integration of corporation and state. Okay, so let’s talk about the media. The legacy media in Canada—$595 million salary subsidy in the last four years, $1.2 billion annually for the CBC, which has also been—it’s also been recommended to the CBC that they decrease rather than increase their reliance on private advertising, $60 million pandemic-specific emergency support fund, $10 million special measures for journalism top-up for 2021 and 22, and then the recent request from the Toronto Star—and I hope I get this right, which is probably the loudest rag in the country beating the Trudeau drum—for $60 million, describing a $30 million annual shortfall in their operating budget.

Here’s the thing I think that Canadians are faced with at the moment that’s so awful. It’s related to this press-government collusion issue. The typical Canadian is someone who’s been bled for years in the reality of peace, order, and good government, right? Our constitutional principle is that our fundamental institutions were essentially reliable—government, education, media—let’s say you could count on them to at least try to tell the truth under most circumstances.

Trudeau now is facing them with a very difficult choice, which is, you either believe that all of those institutions have become corrupt and unreliable in a profound and frightening way—and that now includes the banks—or you can believe that there’s a handful of protesters who have far-right ties and can be justly demonized. I suspect for most Canadians, for many Canadians, it’s easier to believe the latter, especially when that’s what the Prime Minister and his cronies are saying, than the former.

Even though, unfortunately—and I say this as someone with a fair bit of respect for fundamental institutions and wish that they would operate properly— unfortunately, the former has proved itself perhaps in the last two weeks to be far more true than even the most cautious of us and worried of us might have predicted even a month ago.

So there’s a whole lot of things to say about that. I’ll start even on the broader scale than you mentioned. Anybody who is not a partisan and who hasn’t got some infectious radical ideas about one side of the spectrum or the other—in other words, someone who’s reasonable, balanced, probably switches back and forth between Tory and Liberal or Republican and Democrat—those days of equilibrium or easy shift or disagreement, their history. If you look at America in particular—because it connects—by the way, if you look at America and American journalism in the last five and six years, the growth, especially at the cable channels, plural, and the absolute surrender to the most vile partisanship—the whole Russia collusion thing—if you read some of the sane people, Molly Hemingway’s book, for example, you realize, and it’s hard even to digest, that was all confection. That was all composed, that was all made up.

The savagery with which during the Trump years any detail, any detail, got into the CBC wouldn’t be alive today if it wasn’t for Donald Trump. When you switch—and I’m getting to your point—when you switch up to the Biden administration, and we know that he’s kind of long chain coming out of the chamber wrapped in linen, hardly anything—the huge candles that are going on, the Durham Commission down in the States right now, that’s not even getting reported much.

Now I will switch up here—in the very day that the stallions were going into Parliament Hill, you had the coastal gas leak—the attack by 20 masked people with axes who threatened people in the cabs of their trucks. As far as I know, it was close to 24 hours before that even got reporters on CBC. Now, what I’m getting to before I get to the money— is that the press, as an institution, there are many exceptions but, by the mass of the institution, it has decided it is a player, that it will pick a side, that it will inflate the people that it likes to inflate, and it will derogate and damn those that it does not. They will do that from a perch of self-assumed moral superiority.

Here’s what you need to know: they have forgotten that their audience has intelligence and dignity, and they really think that it’s more or less a cooperative movement between the elites of government, bureaucracy, the university, and the press. Then when some low-class operation occurs—that some bunch of, you know, big hat truckers—coming, “Who are these people who are interrupting our complacency and tranquility?” Then you come to your point: it would have been impossible 50 years ago for any institutional press to say, “Oh, by the way, we see ourselves as opposition”— because that’s what a press is. It inquires, it pushes, it tests, but at the same time, incidentally, most of our operation is getting funded by the people we’re dealing with.

Also, the close cohabitation of the high-class journalists with the people that they cover— the sociability of Ottawa is one of the most corrosive things to a free press we ever knew. But I will tell you this: it doesn’t show up on the newscast very often, but when you talk to what I call “the guy in the street,” they know that $600 million goes to the press. They are not watching anymore. And not only that, when the press then say, “Oh, this has been a terrible ordeal for us in Ottawa”—no one got touched. They have been putting up with this condescension, dismissal— they’re yobs, they’re louds, they’re taking up space, they shouldn’t be tolerated.

Who is this, they? And this is coming out of the mouth of a Prime Minister who, more than any other thing, set himself up as the virtue emperor of all the world. He was more tolerant, he was more liberal, he was more broad-minded, he was for all sorts of diversity— except diversity for the people who actually keep the country going. So yeah, I go to the press— the press is a part of this dynamic. It’s a part of this crisis. I don’t know where we go from it; we’ll get to that, I’m sure.

But there’s been an awful lot of an awful diminishment of respect, dignity, and prestige for both the government, and that means, by the way, the opposition parties too, and the press during this. The truckers might lose, as we say in the ancient thing; they might have lost the battle, but they’ve altered the perception of very many things very deeply. So this morning, you know, I don’t know what to make of all of this because it’s happening so quickly.

I can’t believe the state to which the country has degenerated. I’ve been in contact with a reliable source within the Canadian military, and he told me today by email that if I had any sense, I’d take my money out of the Canadian banks, because the situation is far worse than I’ve been informed. And so that’s just one of many such messages I receive on a daily basis.

So let’s talk about the bank. Here’s what our Prime Minister did last week: he permanently destroyed 20 percent of the population’s faith in the entire Canadian banking system and stained the Canadian banking system’s international reputation, I would say, for decades. In any normal time, that in itself would have been enough to constitute sufficient grounds for a non-confidence vote for the government to be ousted—and that’s only one of like the seven things that happened last week that are of that magnitude.

You can’t even keep up with them. So let’s talk about this emergency for a minute. You know, I talked to Brian Peckford, the former Premier of Newfoundland, a couple of weeks ago about the fact that the mandates themselves weren’t justifiable under essentially the emergency clause in the charter, which allows for the suspension of certain basic rights under certain conditions. The mandates themselves weren’t justifiable, especially now.

And now, the ante has been raised a tremendous degree because we have a new emergency, which is apparently more serious than the entire COVID pandemic that justifies the imposition of martial law and the seizing of bank accounts and the retroactive definition of crime and all of this. What’s the thing that is making the Canadian state tremble to the point of its own dissolution? Are all the provincial capitals under seizure? No, I don’t think so. Oh, I got it. The Russians are coming down from the north and they’ve got the fleet of the highest gunnery and which knows not that either.

Oh, maybe it’s inflation, and if we kill the truckers, you know, we ruin the truckers, we can take—look, even trying to be an advocate, okay, great imposition. I’ll go that far. Great imposition on the kind of comfort and tranquility of Ottawa, but there’s been an awful lot of imposition on the tranquility of every person in this country for the last two years. You couldn’t visit your sick mother if she was in an old age home.

You cannot—Look, Freeland is supposed to be bright, and Mr. Lametti, after some of the things he’s been saying, I have to hold judgment on where’s the threat. There isn’t one. This was just the longest, most sustained—and almost, you can read it and you can see the live pictures from people who are not in the news media— it was even an almost celebratory thing. If even the delegation of the Trudeau cabinet had walked down the streets of Ottawa, had enough of parkers that they could sit outdoors and spend two hours talking to some of these real people, this could have been washed away.

Even advocates de diabolo, I cannot do it because I cannot even in fantasy come up with—okay, let me try. So we’re going to say, all right, so this is a radical right-wing movement and it’s funded by mega-money flowing in from the United States and that there’s a real threat of a January 6-style insurrection and, as a consequence, to protect Ottawa and the stability of the state, we have to make the trucker convoy illegal and then we have to hunt everyone down and track everyone down, whoever donated because they’re part of this extreme far-right network that has its origins in the United States, and the entire integrity of the state is now at risk?

Well, does anyone believe that? It’s like—so because I don’t get it. I don’t even see why this is a wise move strategically for the liberals. Well, I tell you there is a reason why they believe it because this is why I brought up the United States—it wasn’t idle. They had a sustained four years of believing what was not true. I’m stating this with definitive force: it simply wasn’t true. Putin did not own Trump. Now people might not like to hear that, but it was a confection. It was a setup, and yet all of the great investigative powers of some of the greatest journals and television stations in all the world went with it day and night.

You have, for example, Mr. Biden’s son with his contracts and these Chinese not even to be mentioned. Here’s how it comes to be: this far-right, the white supremacy movement. I see the phrase “white supremacy” so often, and I wonder where this is coming from. There will always be, as you know, some fanatically stupid set of people with some fanatically stupid cause, but there has not been, may I use this word—a pandemic of racist white challenge, but it’s been the father and the new speak and the woke dialect and it’s been shoved out so often that if you say the word “MAGA,” now this is where Lametti comes in: he said, “You know, if you’re pro-Trumpian, I can go down to Newfoundland and go from Port-au-Prince to St. John’s and then up to St. Anthony, and I will not meet anyone who is pro-Trumpian.” I mean it’s silly.

But if you have it pounded hard enough and long enough, enough people will believe it. Well, I can’t think of any other reason than belief in something like that that could possibly justify what’s happening. Because I can’t believe that. So I’m trying to look for alternative explanations.

You know, it’s okay. The Liberal government has decided to implement a state of emergency. Okay, so here’s a psychological explanation: Trudeau’s father did that back in the 1970s, and justin is constantly trying to prove his validity as a figure of masculine integrity. I think there’s probably some of that going on because if there wasn’t, he wouldn’t have run for prime minister to begin with, because he’s so supremely unqualified to be prime minister that it’s a complete bloody miracle that anyone could be narcissistic enough to assume that with that little knowledge, a role like that should be adopted.

So that’s definitely a factor. And so he’s got to stand up and show that he can do it under duress, and then it’s got to be the belief that there’s something like a far-right conspiracy occurring because invoking the martial law act—the Emergencies Act—is such a preposterous move that unless you actually believe that there was a signal threat of that paranoid sort, there’s no way you could justify it strategically, because I cannot see how anyone could think through, including Christian Freeland, by the way, the notion that this is going to go over well over a period of something approximating a month.

So it’s got to be that. And I read the other day that because FINTRAC never found any evidence of radical foreigners colluding in a right-wing manner to fund the Freedom Convoy, that most of the information that the government depended on was actually generated by the CBC. And so then we have this feedback loop, right?

Well, there’s that. Yeah, and that’s a whole other bloody insane catastrophe that that funding site was hacked by a crazy activist and then that information was distributed, and that distribution of stolen information is technically illegal. And the media jumped on that, and the government capitalized on it, and it’s got to be that they believe their own press. And that’s so interesting because they bought the press and paid them to tell them what they wanted to hear, and now they believe it and justify their policy as a consequence of that.

I’ll pick up on two things you said. If there is some sort of dynamic of equating with the achievements of the father, the only thing I’ll say about that—you’re the psychologist—is that in 1967 there was a very sweet man, I only read off him, but I heard enough people who it was a cabinet minister, Pierre Laporte. There was an English ambassador. Boriss’ report ends up in the trunk of a car, having been shot. There were all sorts of various actions by the FLQ that certainly generated justified anxiety. I won’t go into detail because younger people wouldn’t remember any of this stuff, but there was some talk among the great French Canadian leadership, Mr. Claude Ryan of the Davar, that we maybe we may have to step in.

But what I’m trying to say, and not very well, is that at least there was a portion of actual deed in action— a horrific murder. Touches of something very close to or equal to real terror—when Pierre Trudeau hauled it down. The second thing—in the context of an actual separatist movement that genuinely posed a threat to the integrity and in the context also of light movements like the Weather Underground in the States that were blowing up post offices and shooting people.

It was also a time when this paranoia, anxiety was alert, and that the hardest leftist people were starting to think of themselves as guerrillas in the New World Order. The other thing was—this is very important— the news clip is available, I don’t know, I can’t remember the name of the journalist, but on the day that Pierre Trudeau bought in the War Measures Act, which was the big, big, big thing, he was stopped by some reporter, I presume he was going in, but it doesn’t matter. He was stopped by a reporter, and instead of, you know, brushing him off or leaving question period, the two of them—and Trudeau is just standing there— the two of them have this back and forth.

The reporter is really pushing, and Trudeau, give him all the credit in the world, he’s pushing just as hard and almost nasty weak-kneed liberals was one of the phrases he used. What I’m saying there is that even if he overreached in the time, he was willing to stand face to face with a real reporter for almost half an hour, going back and forth as the camera—in other words, he didn’t hide.

Now I’ll go to your other point. He has to believe it. Look, maybe there is a substantial fantasy that is operative in the entire liberal cabinet, and if Mr. Trudeau actually believes that there is a genuine threat of mega overthrow and trumpian forces, there were, was it 30-plus people in his cabinet? They can’t all share that fantasy.

And if we have 30 people elevated, well then how else do you account for what they’re doing? Because it’s a bloody disaster—because they genuflect. I put a note in the column that you kindly posted. I said heroes, and I was exaggerating. Where are the five or six people in his own cabinet or in his own caucus that are saying, “Justin, you have really, really overreached vastly. You have insulted the nature of this country, which is always the middle course, always willingness to at least try a compromise and a talk, and you’ve introduced false drama.”

And that’s my explanation. Maybe the melodramatic idea of a great national emergency that will flare across the world, maybe he saw himself as the hero.

But if you’re following the international press, we’re getting a real beating. Happy days, our sunny days are not here again. Okay, so let’s go back to Pierre Trudeau for a moment. I mean, I thought the imposition of the War Measures Act was uncalled for because I was just as afraid of the federal government as I was of the FLQ, let’s say. But I think you could have had a debate about that. But let’s look at what the NDP did then, okay?

Because let’s talk about the NDP and Jagmeet Singh because I think, if anything—and this is quite the insult— I think if anything, he’s more juvenile, immature, and narcissistic than Trudeau, and that’s really saying something. Now back when the War Measures Act was implemented, the major—now, I was involved with the NDP to some degree at that point, and I knew a fair number of the leaders of the provincial parties, not well, but I knew Grant Notley well, and a lot of those people had come up through the labor union movement, genuinely, and were actually concerned about the working class.

Not all—I’m not saying that about all the socialists, but a high proportion of their leaders were genuinely concerned with the well-being of the working-class labor union types. And the NDP opposed the War Measures Act on principle. Sven Robinson, who’s part of that cohort, a little later but part of that cohort, also opposed it. Yesterday, and yet Jagmeet Singh and the NDP, from the polls I’ve read, that followers of the NDP are those most set against what the truckers have done, and he’s following Trudeau around like a lap dog.

Well, yeah, you brought it all up, and it’s really good, and yes, for the younger people that are watching this, I actually remember—I’ve got a fairly good memory. I remember Tommy Douglas, and when he brought down the War Measures Act, at least in English Canada, I mean it swept, it had a lot of visceral and immediate approval. Maybe because, you know, it’s in Quebec. Never mind the reasons; it was a winner in the majority of circumstances.

But Tommy Douglas was from out west. Murmur Tommy Douglas. He braved against that particular wind. He took a hard stand, and he was not—I wouldn’t say alone, but he was very close to being isolated. Yet he stood up. Here’s a maxim for you. He’s the most admired man in Canadian history, by the way. Tommy Douglas— right there was a poll a while, a couple of years ago, maybe the CBC ran it, which makes it suspect.

But of all the people listed, Tommy Douglas was listed as the most admired political figure in Canadian history. Here was the thing, though. He understood one thing about government: that if a government goes to its greatest extremes and reaches for powers that are normally not accessible, that is the precise moment that the opposition brings itself to its fullest possible energy, even if the government is right.

When they are reaching for ultimate and overriding civil liberties, then you have to— it is your duty to stand up and test it, and test it again and again and challenge it and exert the greatest pressure. Explain yourself, justify it, limit it, give us the boundaries. And yet in this particular case, the very day, as you have mentioned, that they brought in this thing and let the police loose on the protesters, that’s the day that Parliament doesn’t even meet.

And Mr. Singh—Mr. Singh will win every student council election in Canada, but his relationship to the working people, the oil men, the loggers, the fishermen, the farmers, the service people, the truckers—he is an anathema to demand, by the way; he’s hurt the reputation and the historical legacy of the party he represents.

And I’m not an NDP here, but I could, you know, I can respect and know what they did, and I admire them for that. Even the Communist Party of Canada announced yesterday that they weren’t in favor of the Emergency Act because they realized—well, they realized that that allows instantaneously for the demonization and the criminalization of anything like organized labor protests.

Yeah, of course, and so obviously—so okay, so let’s talk about that Friday event just— let’s, because this actually really needs to be focused on. So, you know, you’d think the conservatives—I don’t understand why all the MPs on the Conservative side just didn’t go to Parliament anyways. I can’t believe—like, Canadians have to think this through. So we had martial law imposed; it’s supposed to be debated in Parliament.

And then we have to talk about the fact that there’s been no Parliament for two years. It’s supposed to be debated in Parliament on the very day that the debate is supposed to start; the government announces that it’s going to suspend Parliament yet again— not because of COVID, but because of the dangers of the situation they created—to stop debate about that very measure, and everyone went along with it. You cannot make it up!

You really can! By the way, under conservatives, they have a mass of MPs. And if they didn’t want to go to Parliament yesterday—hey, they shouldn’t be flying home; they should have gone down in a cluster, and they should have walked the streets. They should have at least had conversations— not anything else; just conversation. How is this going? What are they doing? What do you think? When would you leave?

Show them that their representatives actually talk to the people that they represent. Secondly, they should be at extreme volume. They have been tepid; they have been removed. There is no vigorous—no, no, no, no clamorous opposition to this. This is the biggest thing that has happened since the imposition of the War Measures Act, which saw people picked off the street and put into jail. This is a really, really big thing.

It’s possibly going to deepen the cleavages we already have in this country to a very, very high point. It’s a dismissal again, again, of a majority of people who are out west. Canada is not Ontario and Quebec, however wonderful those provinces are.

But it’s becoming some sort of—if you’re not woke, and you’re not in the laptop class, and if you’re not professionally insulated from all the pressures of COVID, if you can ride around easily, you’re in one world, and if those who keep the country functioning— who fix the water mains, who deliver the goods—if they start to feel the pressure and say to their government, “We want some hearing,” oh, well, they’re radicals, they’re hypocrites, they’re Islamophobes, they’re misogynists, and also, of course, they’re probably bunching up to being Trump terrorists, and of course, naturally, they’re racists. Have you looked at the crowds that were in Ottawa? Did that seem white supremacist? Some joke.

Okay, so let’s talk about the preconditions for the occurrence of suspending Parliament on Friday now because that’s absolutely scandalous and it should have been front-page news on any reliable newspaper across the entire country because it’s so utterly catastrophic—but you’ve been beating the warning drums about the suspension of Parliament for the last two years. And so let’s go into that.

First of all, it is not clear at all that there’s any reasonable, that there’s any rationale whatsoever that’s credible constitutionally or politically for the suspension of Parliament itself during the time of the COVID crisis. Because Parliament is the place where the voice of the people meets the voice of the leaders and where the political thought that guides the country originates.

And so it was even though we had, what would you call it, essential services that stayed open during the COVID epidemic, Parliament wasn’t deemed one of them. So Parliament is now not an essential service?

Okay, so now we’ve been trained in some sense or become accustomed to the fact that government can occur in this country in the absence of Parliament. So I would like you to collaborate because you’ve—very glad you brought that up because this is another thought that has occurred to me. I was wondering, because of all the kinds of questions you already asked: you know, what justified this? What’s the big emergency, etcetera? Well, I trace it back to the beginning—once Parliament—once COVID came, this kind of lazy and distasteful oversight government, I think that’s the first thing to say.

They first of all saw it as an opportunity to be semi-heroic in its management, even though at the beginning, and I won’t go over it, the first two or three months they were a total mess. But they found it also a very convenient thing that they don’t like question periods. They don’t like accountability; they’re not getting much force from the press that they could walk away from that.

Then you had this situation where even something so mighty as a national budget— they asked originally for two years. Oh, well, they skipped one year but they asked for the powers for two years until they got slapped down. They had their SNC and their WE scandal, so this wasn’t a good time to have Parliament open in any effective kind of way.

Now get to the essential thing: in the period of true crisis, and we call it a pandemic—a true crisis— the most important institution, not essential, quintessential, five—right? The essence— the quintessential thing is the Commons. And if you bring in emergency legislation and suspend civil liberties and seize bank accounts and phone up people who made legitimate donations to see if they’re on side—shut down shopkeepers—in other words, because you send their names out—that is the ultimate no.

The Tories in particular should have been sitting on those steps, screaming at the top of their lungs, “Why is it open in the house?” That’s right. That’s right. Yep, absolutely! They should have gone en masse and through the police to the House of Commons and demanded that the debate take place. It’s a catastrophic failure of opposition. Yes, it is! It is! I don’t know where it’s going to go.

I really don’t. Well, let’s dig down farther into that, so what’s happened in the absence of Parliament? Three things I would say—or four things. One is the abdication of executive and legislative responsibility to hypothetical experts, so all on the public health side. So follow the science, follow the experts. It’s like there’s no clear pathway between medical facts to valid policy.

The only pathway from facts to policy is through Parliament, through the executive branch and the—the executive operations and the legislative operations thinking through the problems in public in the House of Commons and in the provincial parliaments. Yeah, that’s the pathway—not from the bloody science to the outcome, ever. So they could devolve all their responsibilities onto medical experts and claim compassion and wisdom in doing so and demonize, “What, you’re not following the science?”

Yeah, so that’s number one. It’s like, so now it’s government by fiat and government by experts and the unit and the restriction of what constitutes appropriate lawmaking to one dimension, which is putative public health conceived of in an extraordinarily narrow sense— without debate.

And then the next thing— and you and I have talked about this a fair bit in private—is the fact that all these bloody governments, including the provincial governments in Canada, have started to rely on nothing but opinion polls as a means of sampling what the public thinks. And I’d like to go into that psychologically for a moment. You know, Canadians now simultaneously, according to the polls, don’t want the mandates and don’t support the truckers.

Now it doesn’t take a bloody genius to notice that those two things are at odds to one another, and so you might think, well, how clueless is the public? And that’s not the right conclusion; the right conclusion is how stupid are we to rely on opinion polls, because it’s extraordinarily difficult to sample what the public thinks.

And the reason we have institutions like Parliament—in fact, the actual reason we have institutions like Parliament—is because that’s a much better method of determining over a long period and in a sustained way what the public thinks when they’re thinking carefully over multiple weeks, when many of them are together discussing, and when all of that’s organized into something approximating a free political system. Opinion polls subvert all of that.

Not only that, here’s another point that builds completely on what you just said. One of the functions, as old as there is a Parliament and especially the mother of all parliaments, of having these great vast parliamentary reform bill of 1832, is that the debate itself is an agency of the establishment of public opinion. If you don’t have the arguments and the debate, then opinion has no way to fashion itself or to respond to or to modify previous positions.

You don’t take a static—by the way, these polls are also highly suspected. I mean, not only methodologies, I think—I don’t say it out loud. I think some of them are partisan, but I go back to Parliament. If you cannot have a discussion in the parliamentary chamber of bringing in the most serious piece of legislation that we’ve seen, as you said, in 50 years, what is the point of Parliament? What is it?

I can’t get it! Well, it’s an impediment. Okay, so we can talk about that. It’s an impediment to what, exactly? So let’s go down deeper into Trudeau’s motivation. Both Christian Freeland and Trudeau are integrally associated with the World Economic Forum and there’s a globalist agenda—this sounds like right-wing propaganda, I suppose—but there is a globalist elite agenda that is aimed at severely modifying the manner in which our fundamental institutions operate under the, what would you call the impetus of yet another crisis, which is the hypothetical climate crisis.

And I am an admirable Meyer of Bjorn Lomborg. I think he’s done the best work on this matter, all things considered—methodologically. He’s got the best methodology for determining how to analyze what steps should be taken to deal with environmental concerns. I’m not going to call them emergencies; he’s documented it very carefully.

And I defy anyone on the climate catastrophe side to show evidence of a methodology more sophisticated than Bjorn Lomborg’s in terms of analyzing an actual pathway forward that isn’t merely apocalyptic neuroticism and the desire for totalitarian control. And so that’s all lurking in the background and so, and that’s also pulling the country apart in all sorts of ways.

And it’s underneath events, like the fact that this attack occurred in Northern BC the other day on the, on the, on the pro——the other coastal gas light—exactly that—that’s part of the attempt to ensure that we all have cheap reliable energy as we move forward into the future.

And so, and I’m going to make it one more case about this. I worked on the UN Secretary-General’s Report on Sustainable Development for two years and analyzed all this sort of material data, and that’s where I came across Lomborg trying to sort this stuff out. And one of the things I learned from doing that that was really heartening to me and also kind of catastrophically emotion provoking was that if you look deeply into the data, it is from as many different perspectives as you could manage, let’s say with an open heart, the conclusion that you would derive is that the faster we can get cheap energy to the world's poor people—the cheaper that energy is, and that that's mostly going to be fossil fuels—especially natural gas if we can do it right, the faster we’re going to move towards clean energy in general.

The richer people are going to get and the more sustainable environmental movement we can have in the future. We make the poorest people rich by giving them access to cheap energy, mostly facilitated by fossil fuel. That’s the best possible move forward for the planet and for those who are absolutely poor.

And again, I defy anyone on the environmental catastrophe side to formulate an argument showing how that’s not true. You say, “I’m on the side of the oppressed, I’m on the side of the poor.” You’re not! If you’re not for cheap energy, if you’re not for cheap energy, you’re not on that side at all. And so, all other bloody moralistic posturing is enough to distract.

Well, that you—the analysis of the energy movement, I mean, that it is so patrician and so patronizing. And by the way, we just put in over $500 billion of the deficit, over a trillion dollars of debt. Oil is now ramping up to $80 or $100 a barrel, and the Canadian government has seized Alberta, built a concrete wall around it, and the greatest natural resource we have is frozen.

Here’s one for you—maybe the emergencies that we’re seeing this week—I don’t know, maybe this is one way of forestalling the knowledge that they have got it. Wanna hit a time of inflation after two years, two years of economic disaster? The one source of wealth that we have that closed it down— there’s definitely a moral hazard there, Rex, is that, you know, there’s nothing more psychologically attractive than a false crisis to divert attention from a real crisis.

And, you know, I’ve been talking with people who are in the economic know in a very profound manner and who’ve demonstrated that in a variety of different ways, and one of the facts that was pointed out to me rather forcefully over the last month was that over the last 15 years, Canada’s gross domestic product per capita has remained relatively constant at $43,000, while the Americans has moved from approximately that to $65,000.

And so that’s just one of many indicators that Canada is in a state of economic crisis, the magnitude of which has not yet been entirely revealed and that the country is tearing itself apart at the seams. And so why not have a false crisis? Because then you can look heroic when you’re dealing with something that doesn’t exist, and you can beat down the Nazis and the Confederates instead of facing up to the fact that you’ve been so appallingly incompetent and moralistic over the last six years that things are really about to manifest themselves in their true nature.

Well, I thought you could bring this down. We started at a very early point; you can bring this to a good circle. After the two years, we haven’t got the inventory of how many businesses have failed, how many families have been disjointed or depressed and made anxious, how much the economy itself overall has been hurt.

We don’t know yet. If once the banks start to rise their interest rates, how it is, debt will drown us. We also have inflation, but here’s the biggest thing of all. Here’s the biggest thing, and this didn’t happen because of a disease or a pandemic.

You mentioned at the beginning I’ve been at this far too long, but I have not, and I’m not exaggerating, I’m not being rhetorical. I can’t remember a time when there are sharper differences, more angry divisions. We’ve had contests between provinces, and we’ve had big fights over pipelines and transmission lines and all sorts of things, but it was never carried out with animosity. It never, by the way, called up the brands. I went from 50, 60 years; never heard anyone call anyone a Nazi because they didn’t like what they said.

A man who comes in and basically says to the world, “I am the personification of all that is new and correct in a 21st-century virtue.” Remember, it’s 2015. I am sanctified by my own correctness on all of the genuine issues. And six years later, you’ve got stallions on Parliament Hill running into walkers, you’ve got the police probably being forced to do stuff that they don’t want to do.

You have a parliament that’s been eviscerated or castrated; the biggest debt ever, the West is angry, and we have on the public scene—and this is ineffectual—in chaos. We have no—he has abandoned the working class. The president has gone away.

Okay, so no, let’s go back in time a bit. So, you know, I remember I was politically active when the separatist movement was perhaps at its peak, and that would be under René Lévesque. So the country was really tearing itself apart, and I was in Albertan, so there weren’t two provinces that were more set against each other than Alberta and Quebec, and that might still be the case.

But I know that among Albertans at that time, there was respect for René Lévesque. People actually trusted him, and they thought, “Well, those damn separatists, they want to separate, but we can understand why. And we don’t think it’s evil; we just think it’s wrong.” People listened to Lévesque, and Lévesque and Trudeau could have a debate, and there wasn’t this demonization, even when the country was literally on the verge of tearing itself apart.

He’d be a better one in a sense because— but Lévesque was disliked for his cause, but he was very much admired for self-evident integrity. You can be on the wrong side of something and have a great deal of virtue besides that, but here’s a better one: when Alberta was first facing the pillage of its natural resources under the National Energy Program, and that was Pierre senior, it was then, you know, it was Peter Lougheed—who in many ways was kind of an archetypal premier. He was the premier that basically filled a role; the role didn’t fill him.

Those two—and they had a certain equality, intellectual or moral presence—they sat at each other in constitutional conferences on television. I know they sat face to face behind the scenes. Both of them were tough; they were both tough people. And yet there was no residue of, “Oh, he’s a goddamn bastard because he’s a Nazi.”

No, there was enough character in each of them to have a deep and probably irreconcilable difference and still maintain stability and compromise. That’s called Canada, and that is what happened in Canada, is that civility and compromise did prevail up to now.

And that was also back when tough was actually still—yeah, that way. That’s another story altogether, right?

Yeah, well, it’s definitely another story. So so maybe I’ll just review this again just so that everybody knows. So here’s what Canadians are being asked for—they’re asked to decide whether these truckers are a reprehensible bunch of foreign-funded Nazi insurrectionists or whether the entire governing structure in Canada and the press that reports on it has become corrupt in a, what would you say, historically unmatched manner.

And so that’s a tough choice, Canadians, but the first part of that isn’t true, and the second part, unfortunately, is. And you can tell that, not least by the fact that Parliament has essentially been abrogated over the last two years and, more particularly, on Friday, and that we now have retroactive crime in this country and the seizure of bank accounts.

And so this is all occurring when the pandemic is not only coming to a halt on technical grounds, but when many countries around the world are lifting mandates, which would not have been lifted in Canada unless the truckers had protested. So, and that’s in a background of the devolving of executive responsibility to experts and to opinion by all three political parties, the abandonment of the working class by the NDP, and the imposition of a utopian globalist agenda on the entire country, the entire economy of the country.

And that’s basically where we’re at. And I don’t think I can put a footnote on it; I’d say one, two things. I’m laughing, but I’m not. This is a sad, sad mess. I’ll tell you this for sure: that in the immediate future, in the next 12 months, we’re going to hear so many ramifications out of this. We’ve done a great injury that may not be easily repaired over time, and that’s the biggest worry of all— it isn’t the convoy; that isn’t the clearing of the protest; it’s the nature of the country and the harmony that wants it to be new.

Thank you, Jordan. Thanks, Rex! Unprecedented times in our country, and what a bloody catastrophe that is. And, no, you know I’ve not been an admirer of Trudeau since he decided, inappropriately in my mind, to run for office despite lacking all the necessary qualifications for doing so, except the unearned fame of his name. And having said all that, that doesn’t mean I wish that he would reside over the destruction of the country as evidence of his incompetence.

And I guess I would also say—maybe I’ll ask you this too— I cannot see how his government can survive the next month. What do you think? What’s your prediction?

I’m much more pessimistic than you. We have to see because it’s—this is in the middle; this is extremely dynamic. I wrote their little tiny thing: you know, we had Mr. Jordan what he was doing when he called the election earlier last year. This is an issue, but we won’t see an election on it.

Mr. Singh, as you pointed out, has become the tattered tail of a not very noble kite, and the funny thing—the separatist party in Quebec is actually opposing this. We’ve—the greatest Canadians in Parliament are the separatists.

I know I’m laughing, but I’m not. Yeah, it’s a sad time; it’s a serious time. Well, you hear this is what I’d like to say in conclusion, really, because I haven’t been that specific. There were a lot of those men and women that came for two or three whole weeks; they were showing a good spirit, and they had their parties.

Well, you know, you know this was hard. They had to spend the money; they got their money seized by the government. They’re out there being mocked by the majority of the Canadian press. They don’t want to be three months in January and February, squatting in a truck in front of a Parliament building in the middle of minus 20.

So you know something? Now they got the long drive back, and they have been booted out of their national capital. I just say to them, if they listen to you and me in this particular thing, I think you did good stuff, and I think, you know, thank God for the working class. Class is what keeps the country working. And thanks for your time, Jordan.

Thanks for talking to me, Rex. Talk again soon, man.