https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=GWUOG4MzOpk
If you want to find out what a group of people think about any given political issue, that probably takes one dedicated PhD researcher two years to manage. Because you can’t just ask the questions that you think are obvious because they beg the answer. And you’re not sampling anything that has any longevity in terms of attitude. And if you re- if you phrase the question slightly differently, you can get completely opposite responses. And so conservatives get set back on their heels when they do opinion polling. And I think they do that very frequently to abdicate responsibility. It’s like, well, we can’t do this because it’s unpopular. Well, you know, maybe it’s unpopular. Maybe it’s your responsibility to put forth a coherent medium to long term vision. And to hope that you can communicate it well enough so that people come on board. You have to tell the right story. You have to tell the right story. And you have to find the advocates who will help tell that story for you as well. Your audience may not know my history, but I have been in the world of public policy for 27 years. I’ve been at a think tank with the Fraser Institute. I’ve done landowner advocacy with the Canadian Property Rights Research Institute. Business advocacy with a couple of different business groups. I’ve been in media, in print media, television media, as well as radio media. I’ve had my own podcast. And so I’ve seen the- and I own my own business. So I’ve seen the full spectrum of how you try to push ideas along. And I’ll tell you what I would observe is that the conservative movement has pretty well seeded the ground on so many of the culture shaping institutions that we have. In K-12 education, we don’t have a large number of conservative, libertarian minded teachers helping to connect kids with all of the different ideas that are out there, as well as all of the different jobs out there. You have like zero of them. Completely. We don’t even- we’ve even pulled trades education out of most of our schools. So how is this some young kid supposed to know he wants to be an electrician or a plumber or a welder if he doesn’t have access to the opportunities to try it out? So that’s one thing that we’ve seeded. We’ve also seeded the universities. And you know this probably better than anyone else how difficult it is to get your research funded if you happen to have something beyond woke views. It seems like there’s only one particular type of research that gets funded these days. So our universities, I don’t think are giving us the support that we need in the conservative and libertarian movement. On top of that, all of our arts organizations, our filmmakers, the messages that come through all of our Hollywood and other popular film is almost uniformly negative to conservative ideals or capitalism or liberty. Although, you know, there are some notable exceptions. And then of course, I think as well, we haven’t cultivated our friends in the union movement in the way that we should have because increasingly they’re having the same conservative values that we’re talking about here. And so I feel like so many of the different forces that shape society and shape the conversation, I should add media. I mean, media as well. I remember years ago, Lydia Milgen, who was a researcher at one of the Ontario universities, but she worked for the Fraser Institute. It’s almost like a mirror image of how many people in the media self-describe as being atheist or agnostic compared to the general public. And that shapes the kind of stories that get told. So all of the opinion shaping that is done is done by and large by the progressive side of the spectrum, even on the advocacy groups. We have far more active advocacy groups on environmental and social issues from a leftist perspective than we have from a libertarian conservative perspective. So I’m talking about the things that I need to do to try to advance the message, but I’m not going to succeed unless we also have the backup. We need to have the advocacy groups and the think tanks and the academics in the universities. And we need to be hiring teachers and filmmakers who are going to tell our stories. And I think that this is a 20 or 30 year project because it took 20 or 30 years to get to the place we are right now. It’s going to take 20 or 30 years to get us to some sort of balance, but we’ve got to start by recognizing the nature of the problem we created for ourselves and starting to undo it. So what’s your strategy at the present time for communicating the ideas that we’ve talked about today to Albertans? You can’t obviously rely on the centralized legacy media, especially given that they’re government funded now, which doesn’t exactly help their bias. So how is it that you plan to get the ideas that you’re describing out there to Albertans, especially in short order? Because as you said, you have what, seven months till the election, eh? Is that, and that’s when it has to be called? Yes, it does. I’m losing a bit of, I had lost a bit of heart in the legacy media. As I mentioned, I started there. I was an editorial writer and columnist at the Calgary Herald beginning in 1999. And the mantra when I was there by my bosses was that I had to be fair, I had to be accurate, and I had to be balanced. And that’s all I ask of the legacy media is just go back to the kind of journalism that we used to do because that is, I think, what is alienating people when they’re looking at the mainstream media. If they don’t see that their view is going to be presented in a balanced way, then they’re going to go to alternative media sites. And this is part, has led to a number of alternative media sources, some more credible than others, but we’re seeing a polarization now of views. So that if you’re going and looking for confirmation bias and you’re on the left, you’ve got your, a handful of left-wing sources you’ll go to. If you’re looking for confirmation bias on the right, you’ll have your handful of confirmation bias sources to go to. But what really moves us forward as a society is when those can meet in a public square, thrash it out so that we can come to some common understanding on how we move forward. So I maintain a great hope that some of these legacy media will either get back to their original foundational purpose or that some of the new media is going to develop those same principles of being fair and accurate and balanced. And I think some are.