Alberta vs Drugs, Gangs, & Cartels ｜ Minister Jason Nixon ｜ EP 432 (_2V8nKqLkFg)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=_2V8nKqLkFg

Hello everyone. I’m pleased to announce my new tour for 2024. Beginning in early February and running through June, Tammy and I and an assortment of special guests are going to visit 51 cities in the U.S. You can find out more information about this on my website jordanbpeterson.com as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information. I’m going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I’ve been working on. My forthcoming book out November 2024, We Who Wrestle with God. I’m looking forward to this. I’m thrilled to be able to do it again and I’ll be pleased to see all of you again soon. Bye-bye. You know the biggest protesters are not people staying inside the tent cities. They’re often members of the official opposition in our province which is the NDP which is a socialist party within our province. But the vulnerable people in general have been pretty excited once they realize what opportunities they have. I mean do you want my approach which is to reach in, send a warm bus, load everybody up, bring them to a nice warm facility, give them shower, foods and access to medical resources or to be left inside a tent freezing to death taking poison, right? Hi everyone. I had the opportunity today to speak with Mr. Jason Nixon. He’s Minister of Seniors, Community and Social Services in Alberta. Why did I want to talk to him? Well the Albertans under Danielle Smith have taken a very forthright stance written recently for example against the trans butchery and deceit that increasingly characterizes the western world. But more, they’ve also taken forthright action in relationship to the springing up of all these so-called tent cities that now blight the landscape throughout North America and elsewhere. And they haven’t done that in a heavy-handed and punitive way. They’ve done that in a very intelligent and thoughtful way. They’ve removed 200 of approximately 300 cities already in Alberta and really began the enterprise only in December. And I think what’s happening in Alberta, I’m hoping what’s happening in Alberta could be a model for what could happen in jurisdictions like North America wide. And so that’s why I decided to do this podcast. And with Mr. Nixon, he has very interesting history. His father had lived on the street as an addict and alcoholic and was rehabilitated relatively young in his life and then spent the rest of his life helping homeless and addicted people. And Jason grew up in that environment. He grew up surrounded by homeless people even in his own house. And so this is a man who’s actually walked the walk and he knows what he’s doing by all appearances. That’s what we’re all praying. And so we walk through his personal experience and also the details, all of the details are as many as we could manage with regards to what’s happening in Alberta, cleaning up the tent cities, so to speak, and rehabilitating the people who for one reason or another were unfortunate enough or badly aimed enough to end up there. So it’s a hopeful dialogue and I’m hoping that what’s happening in Alberta could be a model for the Western world. So join us. Well, thank you for sitting down with me and with all my guests today. I’m very interested, as you know, in what’s going on in Alberta broadly, but the initial focus for our conversation is going to be what steps you are taking within the confines of Premier Daniel Smith’s government to deal with the so-called tent city epidemic, problem, social phenomenon that’s evident all over North America and is new and surprising. So tell me what the situation is in Alberta and also maybe how we got there. Well, I think I’ll start with how we got there, you know, particularly our capital city in our province, which is Edmonton, and we started to see a real significant situation when it came to tent cities. Some people in our communities will call them encampments, but where we’re seeing hundreds of encampments across the city of Edmonton with hundreds of structures within those tent cities and really a desire, frankly, by the city of Edmonton to embrace those encampments in some way. When I say the city, I’m referring to the municipality, to some members of the government who ultimately have, you know, bylaw control and have the responsibility to keep the city clean. We certainly have some overlap responsibility about caring for the poor and dealing with some of the health issues that are involved, of course, but in general, usually the city is who deals with it. Over time, we just saw these encampments get bigger and bigger and more and more problems come as a result of that. So the chief of police from Edmonton came and saw our government and our premier, for your international viewer and American viewers, that’s like a governor, and came in and laid out for us what they were seeing in those encampments. And I have to tell you, it was pretty alarming. It was shocking. You know, we were hearing stories about underage girls, for example, being sexually exploited inside those encampments. They showed significant evidence of the gangs operating inside these encampments and charging people to even use the tents and to be able to access resources like water fountains or other things that would be in the area. The police were pulling out of those encampments weapons that were quite alarming. Obviously, they were seeing lots of stolen goods, finding dead bodies, and most horrifying, because of course, our country is very cold. They were seeing people that lost their lives as a result of burning to death in these tents because they were trying to heat them with propane and different type of mechanisms to try to stay warm and survive in the elements here. And so in some of those pictures, we could not even release to the media. It was just that shocking what was taking place. And so we got clear instructions from our premier to get to work and to come up with a new plan when it came to those encampments, which we got to work on right away. And this happened just before Christmas this year, so just a few weeks ago. And as a result of that, we launched immediately a task force led by my ministerial department on social services side, but with support of a variety of departments, we put together what we’ve called the navigation center. So that’s a structure within the city of Edmonton where we were able to bring all of the services together, everything from health to housing supports, income supports, prescriptions, even things as simple as giving people ID so that they could be able to move forward with their lives. And then we supported the police and we went in and we started tearing down all those encampments. And we started to have amazing results I look forward to talking with you about. But we made a pretty clear statement that our province is no longer going to tolerate this. One, because it’s not safe for the people in the encampments, but also it’s just not right for a place like Edmonton. And Edmontonians deserve to have a clean city where they can live happily and enjoy their lives. Okay, so let’s take this apart. So you said, first of all, how long ago did this problem start to mount, do you think? Because there weren’t tent cities in Edmonton when I lived there back in the 1980s, that’s for sure. And I visited many times. I mean, there are tent cities now in Toronto too, and that’s a completely new thing. So when did you guys really start to become aware of this as a mounting problem? You know, we started to see tent cities pop up in Edmonton probably over the last two or three years. But in particularly over the last year, year and a half, where it would really become basically every corner that you turned, particularly within the downtown core of the city of Edmonton. The other thing that was new though, was we were also seeing those tent cities well outside of the downtown areas. And so they were starting to pop up all across the city. But that was probably the timeline around Edmonton. I think we really saw that a lot in our country in places like Hastings and Vancouver, which have a real bad tent city culture and drug culture inside that city. But it was kind of more new to our area over the last couple of years. Okay, so it’s about two or three years. Now you said that there were in Edmonton alone, how many people live in Edmonton now? Just so everyone has a sense of its size? We’re getting up towards a million, I believe Edmonton’s somewhere north of 800,000. I don’t have the number around, but that’d be the right area. Yeah, okay. And you said there were literally hundreds of encampments and that some of them had hundreds of tents. Is that right? That is 100% correct. Hundreds of encampments. And inside some of those encampments, I think the biggest encampment I’m aware of was 400 plus structures. Oh yeah, okay. Okay, so that’s starting to approach village size essentially. Well, as a member of the legislative assembly here in Alberta, I represent villages that are smaller than some of these encampments. Okay, okay. So now why in the world do you think this happened so rapidly in the last two or three years? What’s changed? Is it housing costs? I mean, housing costs have gone out of control in Canada. Everyone knows that. And interest rates have gone up a lot. And so, but that alone seems to me to be unlikely as a causal explanation. So, you know, why is this happening? Who are these people in the main and where did they come from? Yeah, you know, housing is a real issue in our country, particularly given some of the bizarre federal policies that we’ve seen from our federal government in Canada and the inflationary problems that we see in North America. But I want to be clear, the challenge when it comes to tent cities is not a housing challenge. Housing is one of the consequences of somebody who ends up in these situations. They don’t have housing, but it’s not a root cause of why somebody ends up inside a tent city. The reality is that lots of this has to do with drugs, lots of this has to do with mental health in other circumstances. And I think there are some people who want to frame this discussion, like mom and dad who lost their job in the oil industry and somehow are struggling to pay their mortgage. That’s a very real issue inside our country and our province that we need to address, and we are working on as a society. But that’s not what this is. These individuals that find themselves in these encampments, lots of it’s drug related. And we are seeing that without a doubt when we go into these encampments. And you know, I really, it drives me nuts personally, as a minister responsible for this in our province, that certain elements on the left continue to want to discuss this issue in the context of housing. It’s not. The root causes of homelessness and why people are in tent cities are something very, very different. And he asked why, what has changed that we would see that more. There has been much more a culture, certainly in our country, of accepting abusive behavior to oneself, including using drugs and a concept that we need to embrace that and accept that putting poison into people’s bodies is how we help them deal with things like addiction. And that’s something our province has rejected under the needs of leadership of multiple Premiers, but particularly Primer Smith, where our province has been really dedicated on focusing on addiction recovery and helping individuals in the circumstance. But there’s certainly elements of our province that just want to let it continue. And so some of that is what’s under tone of all of this issue when it comes to encampments, and tent cities inside our province. Okay. So let me, let me push on that because I want to make sure that I understand this completely. All right. So you make the somewhat surprising claim, I would say that in your opinion, um, a small percentage of the variance in this problem is accounted for by economics specifically related to housing. Now that’s it. It’s interesting to me to have you say that, because if you were inclined to make political points, you could do that just as effectively on the housing and inflation side as you could on the drug use tolerance side, let’s say, right? So, so there’s no, I can’t see any a priori reason why you would come down as a political agent on one side of that argument or another, but what is it that’s made you so convinced that it is in fact a drug problem? To what degree is it an alcohol problem as well? And what drugs, what drugs are primarily the cause at the moment? And, and is that like, is that part parcel of the new wave of drugs that has entered the North American economy? So like, are you certain that it’s drugs and alcohol? How much alcohol, how much drugs, which drugs? So again, I want to be very clear. I don’t dispute that we have housing challenges and you’re right. I can make political statements on that alone that, uh, that I think could be very clear, but that’s a different issue. And why I’m so certain about that is because of what we’re seeing from the individuals that we’ve now been able to successfully get out of these encampments into our social services process with supports around them. And the vast majority, uh, I would say all have some sort of mental health issue and the vast majority are also facing addiction issues as a result. And we’re, so we’re seeing things like fentanyl, which is a major, uh, drug that is impacting all of our societies across North America and the world. We’re seeing much more of that in our communities. Now, methamphetamine is a real big issue inside our communities. There certainly is alcohol, but, you know, and some of these drugs are changing. You know, fentanyl is a major drug that has been evolving on the streets. It has real serious fatal consequences to individuals involved. But that is what is taking place inside these 10 cities. Often it’s a place where individuals seem to be going to be doing drugs. So one other thing that we found out actually should point out is that the vast majority of individuals that we’re interacting within these encampments afterwards are also using our emergency shelter system and other services in our province to be able to stay warm, to get food, to get other resources, to be able to survive on the streets. But they’re using those 10 cities as a place to be able to score drugs, as a place to be able to use drugs. And that is the culture that is taking place in most of these 10 cities. I’m not saying every person, but certainly the vast majority of who we interact with in these 10 cities has got some sort of drug and or alcohol addiction. Oh, okay. So let’s take that apart a little bit. I mean, so back in the early seventies, that’s really when it started, there was an anti-leftist, anti-psychiatry and anti-institutionalization movement. It was driven in part by the kinds of concerns that were brought to light by movies such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which really was quite a genius movie and a great novel and written by a psychiatric orderly who had seen plenty of abusive situations within institutions, to be clear. They were hardly places you would go for a picnic. But the leftist solution to that was to demonize the psychiatric profession and to de-institutionalize. The solution was to produce community alternatives that would help integrate these oppressed people who had been falsely diagnosed with mental illness by evil psychiatrists back into the community. Well, suffice it to say those additional resources were never made available, not in any fundamental way. And many of the so-called mental illnesses those people had were actual illnesses and not figments of totalitarian psychiatrists’ imagination. What de-institutionalization really meant was that many mentally ill people ended up in prison. That was the fundamental, yeah, or on the streets. And so this homeless epidemic is a late stage consequence of the fact that we abandon our attempts to provide proper institutional care. So we’ll get back to that. Now, you said that the vast majority of the people who are in these tent cities have a drug and or multiple drug and alcohol problem and that they are utilizing all sorts of other resources, but that they’re using the tent cities in particular as a place to gather and get easy access to their illicit drugs. Now, obviously, if you’re not naive out of your skull, that’s an amazing opportunity for gangs, for drug-peddling gangs, especially the ones that are peddling the hard and addictive drugs. And so, you know, the problem with this hyper compassionate approach, these poor people, they need a place to live, they might as well move into the parks. Who are we to stop them from having a place to live? They’re all economically challenged. Is that it belies the reality of the drug addiction problem that you described and the criminality that goes along with it? But there’s something even worse. There’s something even more nefarious about it. It completely eliminates the possibility that even if you brought a group of people who were suffering together in this unstructured manner, all you would do is invite the psychopathic gangs to come in and take control. Now, you said that’s what’s happened, that not only are these tent cities, so-called, places of massive drugs distribution, they’re sources of ongoing revenue for not only for gangs, but for organized gangs. And so, for like hardcore multiple offense, dead set against the public order criminals to prey on people who are vulnerable, the addicted population, let’s say, and to prey on them in a multitude of ways. You know, you skipped over some very interesting details like they’re being charged to stay in the tents. Well, by who? It’s not like anybody owns those tents or the land, okay? They’re being charged to get access to water. And then there’s what? Prostitution gangs? And if not prostitution gangs, what? Open rape? Like, exactly what did you guys see when you started delving into this subculture produced by the toxically compassionate? So, you’re 100% right. And when I say gangs, I’m talking about very organized gangs, definitely organized crime. The police brought the government very clear evidence, which they have presented to the media, including photographic evidence of what is taking place inside these tent cities that show that the gangs have control within them and are certainly abusing vulnerable people as a result of that. It’s obviously a place where they’re selling drugs. It’s obviously a place where people are getting access to things that they should not. But we also have received clear evidence that people are being charged even to get to water fountains as a common thing that the police have brought to us. We have, and this for me personally was one of the things that I was just shocked the media in my province to not cover as much as they should. Some of the early tent cities that they went into, the police came out with evidence of minor children being sexually exploited within these tent cities. That alone for me was enough that we needed to tear them all down, full stop, completely unacceptable. And then the other thing that I should point out that the chief of the Emetun police service really has done a good job of articulating for the media is how much stolen property in and of itself is being stored within these tent cities. I mean, they went to this one area where there was a mound of bicycles that were clearly stolen that were bigger than me. Jordan, I’m a real big guy. I’m about six foot eight. He’s a big pile of stolen property. And so there’s been clear evidence time and time again that documents what is taking place with the gangs inside these areas. And you’re right, they are exploiting the most vulnerable amongst us. And so it’s not safe. And I think the key point to this is it’s not safe for the people in the tent cities, and it’s not safe for Emetunians. And I think this is the same circumstance you would see in any other major city in North America where these tent cities are taking place. Financial experts thought we were in the clear. 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Go to Shopify.com slash jbp now to grow your business no matter what stage you’re at. That’s Shopify.com slash jbp. Okay, so now you touched on a couple of other things there too that are interesting. So I know that surprisingly enough like Alberta is a relatively conservative province until relatively recently it was mostly a rural province. It has the reputation and I would say it’s deserved to some degree of being something approximating the Texas of Canada. And yet what I see happening from the outside and please correct me if I’m getting this wrong is that increasingly there is a standoff in Alberta of sorts between radical leftist municipal governments and the more conservative provincial government. And I think that that’s particularly manifest in Calgary, secondarily manifest in Edmonton and then I don’t know enough about Lethbridge’s comments. So tell me to what degree this situation has been set up not only as a consequence of idiotic federal policies that are virtue signaling and spineless and also not in the least compassionate nor productive. None of that. Not accomplishing the ends that the policies themselves were designed in principle to accomplish. There’s a federal component to this but then there’s also a municipal component and one of the things I’ve observed happening in Canada and in the United States but really in Canada is that the radical leftist, full compassionate narcissistic types have seized control of the smaller elements of the governmental institutions including municipal governments. So I know that you have to step somewhat carefully given your position in Alberta in relationship to such a discussion. But you know we did allow for some criticism of the federal government and its relationship with the province. Well there’s no reason not to do the same thing on the other side. What’s the situation with the municipalities? And then well there’s a segue in there because you also mentioned that there’s a strange cooperation between the provincial government and the municipal police on this front which is quite strange right because it means that the province is going around the municipal governments directly to the police. That’s a strange. So can you flesh that out for me so I can understand it more thoroughly? Yeah well let me start with the police. So you know in our structure something like the Edmonton police would answer to a police commission. So while they are a municipal funded organization also funded by the province to a certain amount, the chief of police answers to a police commission not to city council and that’s so that puts the chief in an interesting spot. And when we have somebody like the chief of police of Edmonton come to us and say I’m dealing with a crisis I think I need you guys to support this emergency situation. The cool part about my province is our government’s prepared to jump in even if it’s a little bit unorthodox because we know we need to support that important law enforcement agency. And you’re right there is some interesting dynamics there that would be the Edmonton police service and I think some of those dynamics are probably more that the municipal council has to navigate more than us because we just want to get to work and be able to help people. I will say this that we’re obviously we’re happy to work with every municipal government we recognize that they’re elected that is our job as a province and we will do so. But you are correct I’m happy to say that our large cities over time seem to have more left wing mayors and often city councilors though not all of them than certainly my conservative party here in the province of Alberta. I don’t think I’m saying anything that would shock anybody given that the current mayor of Edmonton is a former Trudeau cabinet minister. I’m not saying anything about him personally he’s certainly not on the same side of the political spectrum. And I think what’s happened over time is if they’re on that side of and that’s their ideology on that side of the political spectrum certainly they’re going to start to believe in some of these ideas which is that you know somehow you can magically help somebody get better by giving them the poison that’s killing them over and over. But I want to also though be clear that I think often that it’s coming maybe even from a good spot. I actually think lots of these individuals truly believe that this will help these individuals get better sometimes but the reality is that they’re not looking at it. I don’t believe that because well the reason I don’t believe it is because there is a tremendous danger in using a false compassion to elevate your own moral virtue publicly and there are ancient prescriptions against doing such things. So the third commandment depends on how you count them is to not use God’s name in vain and what that really means is do not attribute to yourself moral virtue for pursuing something that merely furthers your own agenda. And I see plenty of that on the compassionate left and it’s also a variant of praying in public along with all the protests. It’s like look how good I am, look how much I care. It’s like yeah did you do any of the goddamn work? Like have you ever worked? Yeah exactly let me say that a different way. So then you have a politician like that who is a true believer in it and I believe that you know you got to be blind not to realize what I presented today is actually hurting people and that your ideology is wrong and that you’re willing to allow people to be hurt to continue down presenting your ideological beliefs. But what happens I think is then you have politicians that circumstance that are confusing everyday people who don’t fully understand this issue and they may be looking at things like on the news and they’re going hey that’s probably the better compassionate way to do it because they don’t have all the details that I have. But then when you hear the details that I just present you got to be going well actually that conservative government’s right. I mean do you want my approach which is to reach in send a warm bus load everybody up bring them to a nice warm facility give them shower foods and access to medical resources treatment including rehabilitation treatment for their addiction or to be left inside a tent freezing to death taking poison right. And that’s what I mean by that I think you know that ends up creating a spot where very good people then end up supporting this approach because they don’t you know they’re everyday people are working they just watch us on the news and they go hey well that maybe makes sense and they don’t understand that they in the end they’re ended up supporting an ideology that’s actually killing people. Yeah no look I agree I think that well that’s exactly why I wanted to do this podcast and now I think we should get to the nitty-gritty which is not that all of this was irrelevant but the real relevant issue here is you know what the hell are you doing that’s going to work. So let me give a preamble to this so for everyone watching and listening there’s two majors there’s a concatenation of two major problems here. The first problem is that anti-social behavior and drug use overlap and so what why is that a problem. Well the first problem is there is nothing in the psychological literature that’s more intractable to treatment once it’s established than anti-social slash criminal behavior and there’s absolutely no indication in the clinical literature that it’s that it can be ameliorated. So for example the standard penological doctrine of well-versed criminologists is that you have a if you have a truly repeat offender who has an anti-social history stemming back into like early teenagehood or even before in the form of bullying and and violent behavior as a child the best thing to do with them since no treatment works is basically to incarcerate them till they burn out in their late 20s and like and people can can shrug their shoulders and get squawky about that and bitch about it all they want but I would have been thrilled if I would have gone through the research literature and found any exceptions to that absolutely dismal prognostication in the 30 years I’ve analyzed the literature and have been unable to do so. It’s very very very very difficult to treat anti-social behavior. Okay then you add the other next layer of complication which is difficult as it is to treat anti-social behavior it’s perhaps equally difficult to treat drug and alcohol addiction alcohol often being primary among the problems that are difficult to treat there’s no evidence whatsoever generally speaking that residential treatment centers for example have any beneficial long-term effect they do function to get people off alcohol while they’re in the centers but almost invariably what happens is that when you put the people treated back into their old environment they instantly relapse now this is not to say that no one ever recovers because most people do in fact straighten back up but it isn’t obvious at all how treatment can do that so that puts policy people like you in a really tough bind because you’re dealing with a population that’s very very very hard to serve and so the first thing I would like to know you talked about these uni service centers so I would like to know just what does it mean to offer people treatment how do you tear down these tent cities exactly like what are the nuts and bolts involved in that the process you’re like do you what do you do do you go in there and just like tell me how you clean up the cities and then tell me how it is that people are directed into treatment and then we’ll get into the worst problem of like does it actually work so I’ll start with how how we’re dealing with it now amit is where we’re piloting this approach and I think we’re going to mimic it elsewhere in our province because we’re we are pretty excited about the results but let me tell you what we do first so obviously my social services team at the ministry of social services is in contact with the police the police inform us that the encampment is coming down and they deal with the law enforcement side of that so deal with any elements that they may encounter in there that obviously need to be arrested warrant issues that are taking place they handle law enforcement but we’re there they move in like okay so they make a decision and and what are the laws under which they’re what under what legal pre-tax do they do they move in why do they have the right to do this so two issues that we primarily use one is around just straight-up bylaw enforcement and you know there’s obviously rules about you being able to just go build structures in different municipalities and the second and more common one of late from my understanding is around fire safety issues I mean we have had some pretty serious fires and propane tank explosions the numbers are quite staggering and so it is a legitimate fire issue and so the police have to come in they’re not the firefighters obviously but the police have to come in because of the safety issues that are involved now do you warn the people beforehand and how many policemen do you need per number of tent city occupants what are the logistics here yeah so the city of amilton had a has an encampment policy where they were trying to put upon the police i believe to provide 72 hours notice that they were going to go into those tent cities okay this is something we actually disagreed with because the reality was that just caused people either to move it certainly gave a heads up to that organized crime element that there was about to be law enforcement activity and so you know since we and there was a court case taking place in our province from some activist groups who were trying to stop the police from being able to do this or enforce notice requirements we are the city of amilton and the police actually won that case and that has allowed us to be able to go in and be able to address this without notice and so what happens is obviously we’re notified we arrive with the police and when i say we i mean social workers and our team that are are designed to support the police they work closely with them the police secure the area they deal with their end of it but at that point we have a warm bus right there ready to go everybody is offered an opportunity to be able to go to what we call our navigation center okay that’s everybody so that you offer that to everybody in the camp and and what are the what’s the biggest camp that you guys have managed to take on at a time well i think the biggest camp that i’ve heard of would be 300 350 structures since we started this process interestingly enough though you would only find probably a few dozen people actually within that tent city when we we arrive oh i see i see okay so you’re looking at numbers under 100 when you’re when you’re moving in and you’re okay okay so and so that’s what five or six buses four or five buses something like that yeah it depends on the circumstance obviously there’s been there would be police intelligence and our you know our our team would be giving a rough idea of what they think is going to be coming while we’re arriving on scene they’re ready going back to that navigation center they’re saying here’s how many people we think we have coming in you know one of the big things we have there’s the ability for them to be able to load and totes their personal belongings we don’t want anybody to lose their stuff we even take pets jordan we can load the pets up on that bus couples can go together and we get them from there to the warm navigation center and they arrive at that navigation center there’s showers available right away there’s food coffee things that people may need obviously it’s a warm location we also have shelter beds there for you know sometimes people need to dry out or something that may take place obviously there could be medical circumstances that need to be addressed obviously anybody who would need a hospital of course we would use paramedics we would get them immediately to emergency but beyond that everything else can be handled in that navigation center and so when you get there you’ll you interact with our staff and then there’s multiple different stations throughout it which i’ll talk about and the genius i think of what we’ve done here is we brought instead of trying to take this person from you know these tent cities all over the city to all these different services we brought all the non-profits all the government services together in one spot to come around that individual and so they’ll arrive and they can get full medicals there’s doctor there’s our medical teams for the street that can deal with that access to prescriptions you know one of the most interesting things that you find that a lot of individuals in this circumstance need is id they don’t have id no more so we have our ministerial colleagues over in service alberta who handle our id in our province they’re there right on site they can give temporary id immediately to these individuals and then we can get their permanent id ordered all the pictures they obviously have access then to income supports be able to register for things that they may be entitled to that they did they did not know and then ultimately towards things like temporary housing emergency housing and eventually permanent housing resources so they can interact with those individuals and of course access to drug recovery programs which we can talk about in a moment but that is all happening in that one location and so we’ve been at this for about three weeks we’ve seen you know well over 200 individuals come out of those tent cities and actively participate in this process we referred to over 500 different services and we’ve been pretty impressed with the results of that now that may seem like a small number but given what we’ve been working on this is kind of a you know a real micro area that we’re working on but we think it’s been so successful that we’re getting ready to bring this right into our actual emergency homeless shelters which are thousands of individuals and into other areas where our social services system interacts with with the same type of clientele and again with the goal of saying how do we help you stop the circumstances that you’re in and move forward i also want to stress that we talked a lot about drugs today but there’s a lot of mental health issues that are taking place including schizophrenia and some real challenges right these are very serious mental health issues and by being able to come in and we have our other health services right around us again pharmacists support we can really get some really needed things around those individuals to start to have a good conversation about what a more successful healthy life might look like going online without express vpn is like leaving your kids with the nearest stranger while you go to the restroom they’re probably not a kidnapper or a serial killer but why would you ever take that risk every time you connect to an unencrypted network in cafes hotels or airports you leave your data vulnerable any hacker on the same network can steal your personal data such as your passwords and financial 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Jordan okay so i got a couple of questions there there um and some procedural i want to discuss some procedural issues too okay so the first issue is i’m trying to imagine what it’s like for someone in a tent encampment to be let’s say uh displaced in that manner and you could imagine two stories one is that people are pretty damn pissed off that the cops have showed up and are now you know tearing down their their structures but a counter story might be they’re actually kind of relieved to be on a warm bus going somewhere that’s actually warm where they can have a shower and something to eat etc and so um what’s your sense of how the tent city inhabitants themselves are responding to this intervention by government authorities and police so the the vast majority of the individuals that we’ve interacted with that are actually in the tent cities uh that would then come into our services obviously so obviously if the the police have had to arrest a gang member something like that they’re probably not that thrilled that we’re here but the individuals that we’re trying to get there to help uh they react very positively you know the biggest protesters that we’ve seen or others who are trying to uh interfere with this process are not people staying inside the tent cities they’re often members of the official opposition our province which is the NDP which is a socialist party within our province or other activist groups who certainly have never spent one night on the street and are there trying to bang on a drum that has nothing to do with what we’re talking about and they’re just trying to use these vulnerable people to be able to you know accelerate their agenda and which is very disappointing we’ve seen i’ve seen some uh police body cam of footage of these individuals throwing snowballs at the police while they’re trying to go and interact and deal with the situation in the encampments but the vulnerable people in general uh have been pretty excited once they realized what opportunities they have and i’ve been there to interact at this navigation center with them and i’ve also heard from my staff and the most common reaction is i had no idea that this resources were available and they are quite interested in it now obviously everybody’s at a different stage that may be taking place there but certainly i think uh you know you get a nice warm bed you can have a warm shower you probably start to ask questions about whether or not you want to continue to sleep inside that tent in minus 50 degrees celsius or if this is a better option okay okay so now i want to ask you um about how you regulate the interactions between people in these centers because you we already discussed the fact that in the tent cities the fact of the tent cities is an invitation to criminality and gangs and so then the first question i have is like how the hell do you ensure that that problem isn’t duplicated inside your your centers themselves so it’s a very important question and i will answer it but i also want to emphasize that what we see on that you know for lack of a better uh word on the left side of the spectrum when they argue about us taking down these tent cities is they often say well your shelters are just as dangerous now again if you go back through this entire conversation we just had you realize how ludicrous that is real quick that said of course we start putting thousands of individuals in the same type of demographics a lot of the same circumstances happening inside our emergency shelter system you’re going to see some of the same elements show up and we for sure have seen gangs operating within our emergency shelter systems we are obviously managing overdoses and drug issues and those type of circumstances but but we’ve invested in security we are working closely with our local police services who really support us and are often non-profit emergency shelter providers to be able to navigate through those issues we’ve also upped security to be able to make sure that uh people’s stuff is safe we’ve had to put a lot of money into dealing with overdoses and other medical issues within our emergency facilities and while anywhere as you know jordan in society where we start to gather that many people together there’s going to be you know elements of trouble it is certainly significantly less than what we’re seeing inside tent cities and we’re definitely using tools to be able to mitigate those circumstances okay okay so now i’m going to ask you some questions more on the psychological and treatment front as i said i spent a lot of time looking into the viability of treatment processes that are are widely distributable and effective and on the psychological front and with regard to addiction counseling and the treatment of various forms of mental disorder and they’re few and far between effective treatments so i want to ask you a couple questions the first is have you guys given some consideration to the maximum size of your facilities because my suspicions are that the smaller you keep those centralized centers the less trouble you’re going to have with their spiraling into criminal activity and gangs and the more welcoming you’ll be able to make them for people who are being taken off the street so so that’s the first question what what have you seen and are you tracking the data pertaining to the size of the initial treatment facilities so we are definitely tracking data and i one of the things that we’re trying to do on my end of policy and the process that my ministry runs is to try to bring in other types of the ways that we do emergency shelter for for the homeless population so you have your much more traditional shelters that many people would just think about that they’d see on tv often run by a faith-based organization i want to say thank god for our faith-based organizations because they really do good work with us but we have recognized a need for smaller shelters shelters that are focused on women only for example in our in our society in our province shelters that are indigenous focused with indigenous leadership right on site to be able to to work on that we’ve opened up indigenous only shelters women only shelters inside our province supported by the government and we’re seeing success by getting that smaller and being able to work with different demographics more focused at the end of the day what we have in our province and what what premier smith has done in our province is actually bring in a mental health and addictions cabinet minister my colleague dan williams who is part of the health system who is fully focused on mental health and addictions and so he’s the best one to talk to about specifically how they handle long-term drug treatment but my job now is is to rejig the entire social services system in our province to end up connecting to that and that’s where there’s a real difference in viewpoints between us and the left right i mean where they want us to build shelter systems where everybody can keep doing drugs and just accept that behavior and and ignore the negative consequences of that we are building shelter systems and processes that connect into the work that dan williams and his team are trying to do and it is a whole different way of thinking i don’t know anywhere else in the province where you’ve got an entire social services system working on focused on actual recovery care long term for individuals right so we’re we’re not in the business of trying to warehouse people our job is to find individuals support them with their immediate medical needs and then try to connect them to long-term opportunities to get them better okay so okay so that brings me to the second clinical issue i wanted to bring up so you can treat people’s present distress but much of people’s present distress is rooted in a kind of nihilistic and anxiety-ridden hopelessness and they say it’s been said forever that the people perish without a vision and one of the things you do see with people who adopt a very short-term strategy towards life which can have a criminal element or an addictive element is that they don’t have anything resembling a vision for their life or a plan and so we experimented my my colleagues and i experimented with the provision of planning software and so we have a program online called self-authoring which is very inexpensive requires no supervision whatsoever to administer that’s completely private and that’s actually accessible to everyone to some degree assuming a basic level of both literacy and ability to use a computer but virtually everyone can use a phone now so you know that’s less and less of a problem okay so it’s called self-authoring this program okay so now the first thing it does it’s got three stages and you can do just one or or three let’s say one or two or all three the first stage has people write out what’s essentially an autobiography and it’s a good treatment for trauma so it asks people to go through their life to write their life story essentially but it provides them with a lot of different prompts break your life into six epochs describe the major positive and negative events then it walks you through an analysis of those events so what that tries to do is to situate people in relationship to their past and bring them up to the present okay so this is where i came from these are the events that shaped me and and this is where i am now okay so that’s the past authoring now the present authoring helps people assess their faults and their virtues and the so it presents them with a variety of descriptive statements that they can check off and then it aggregates the ones that they’re most convinced about and it says well it helps them walk through an analysis which is what stupid things are you doing that hurt you as far as you’re concerned and what are your strengths that you could capitalize on if you decided to move into the future okay so that’s the second stage the third stage this might be most relevant to your endeavor is the future authoring program so here’s the here’s the program so people who are who are writing the essay let’s say are enjoying to imagine that they were treating themselves like they like they were someone they wanted to help okay now project yourself five years in the future okay so here’s the deal within the bounds of reason you can have what you want and need but you have to specify what it is you have to aim at it now we’re always moving towards an end and so if you don’t have an aim you don’t have any hope because hope is experienced in relationship to an aim and you’re anxious because there are too many places to go so you bind yourself with a vision and you give yourself hope all right so five years down the road what would your life look like if you were educating yourself properly if you were in a career that was the one you wanted or at least a job that was the one you wanted if your family was put together in some reasonable manner if you had the friends that you needed if you were regulating your drug and alcohol use which needs a plan and not merely cessation of addiction if you were contributing to your community if you were taking care of yourself if you were occupying yourself properly with your time outside of work if you could have what you wanted what would it look like okay the reason i’m telling you this there’s two reasons number one is it’s dirt cheap it’s easily accessible and we have produced solid empirical data and this has been replicated in other ways in other labs using writing exercises the worst so if you take young men who have a bad academic history and they do this future authoring exercise for 90 minutes when they’re orienting themselves at college they are half as likely to drop out half right it produces an increment of 35 percent in grade point average right three separate studies one at mohawk college in ontario so basically a trade school one at mcgill university and and four studies two studies that were aggregated at a business school in the netherlands and the most potent effects were for the worst performing minority young men right so one of the things that might be worth considering is in course see people who are lost need a plan they need to figure out who they are and they need a plan now that’s an expensive proposition but this process circumvents the expense and then there’s an up another upside which is apart from it not costing anything it has no negative consequences right so even if it fails it isn’t going to hurt people right so i’m curious so so far you see we’ve kind of approached the addiction and the homeless problem as something akin to an addiction you know which is let’s say it’s a consequence of craving in the present but that’s not all an addiction is an addiction is something that destroys the future and so people often look the addiction literature is crystal clear people will not stop taking their drug of delight until they have something better to do so young men for example are very much likely to abuse alcohol with some regularity most of them quit around 24 25 something like that when they take on like a full-time job and adopt some adult responsibilities but until then they think well you know it’s entertaining to drink my drink myself into the ground three nights a week and and many of them do but as soon as there’s something better to do they quit now if you don’t have anything we even saw this with rats so for example you cannot get rats that are integrated into a social environment addicted to cocaine yeah i know the study well yeah right if you isolate them put them in a in a alone in a box they’ll take cocaine in preference to everything else okay so i’m wondering have you guys integrated anything like a like a uh what would you say a process that helps people generate a concrete plan into the treatments that you’re offering so how it’s taking place in alberta is because we have our mental health and addiction ministry uh they’re bringing forward i’m going to talk a little bit about what they’re doing recovery programs and so and you’re right i mean i used to do this for a living before i was in politics so i i follow a lot what you’re saying here jordan and about you know having to get that community together obviously got to deal with the immediate issues that somebody’s dealing with maybe immediate trauma there could be some pretty significant mental health issues you start going down the road of schizophrenia as you know we’re going down a different type of path but in general you got to get community around people you got to deal with their immediate issues show them a path forward your right goal setting uh and off you go i would say another one that i’ve learned over time was also showing people there’s other ways to be able to have fun appropriately that’s yes definitely definitely there’s other ways to do to be able to go forward like that and so when you get into minister williams department after you leave our services and if you’re focused on recovery they do something called recovery capital it’s one of the first things they do they start a process with an individual to understand what their recovery capital is and so that talks about the access they have where they’re at what they have access to and obviously the drug side of things that i’m dealing with right there in the homeless population would be some of the toughest addiction issues that minister williams department will have to deal with i mean this is this is not a functioning alcoholic this year individuals are living in a tent right and they’re in very different circumstances so they’ll have lower recovery capital but that means there’s going to be more that needs to be done to get them to recovery but certainly they put together that process what’s different though in alberta is we’re committed to that process and so if you see other provinces or other jurisdictions in the world they want to go to a different process they want to go to the put them in an apartment paid for by a taxpayer let them do drugs till they pass away that’s essentially what it comes down to go in there and say you know what you’ve got this disease called addiction there’s basically nothing that can be done we just want to support you and make you comfortable alberta we don’t believe that we believe that individuals can recover we believe the science is there it’s hard work you’re correct but our job now in our social services sector under the leadership of primersmith is to build a system that bridges into these recovery programs they’re being built by our colleagues in mental health and addiction and then the next part is really important that we have a system on the other end of those recovery programs because you’re correct they go into something like an addiction treatment they get the tools to deal with their addiction set long-term goals get through that process and then you come out and what happens too often is you come out then you just end up relapsing because there’s nothing that’s built around it. We’re really focused on both ends of it we want to build a social services system that brings people into active recovery support obviously our colleagues who are doing the recovery and then be there on the other end as you come out of recovery post housing post support and that’s going to look very different for different people i mean particularly if you’re dealing with different trauma different circumstances but in our province we don’t want to accept that you’re going to be in palliative care for drug addicts we want to get you to where you can get the help we want to get you the help and then we want to support you as you go on with the rest of your life and when we’ve done that we’re seeing people have very successful lives Jordan you can beat addiction you know and there’s some more complications now with the different drugs we’re seeing and what it’s doing to brain chemistry and you know it makes some of this more challenging but reality is we do not accept in Alberta that if you’re addicted to a drug that this is a fatal disease and our job is we are rejigging our social services system to make sure that we are all focused on that when it comes to drug addiction we’re currently in the midst of lent the 40 days leading up to easter many christians are choosing to give up alcohol social media and other distractions to focus more on prayer fasting and giving hallows annual pray 40 challenge is one of their most popular last year over 1 million people joined and this year there are 1.62 million people praying as part of the challenge this year’s pray 40 challenge focuses on surrender and includes meditations on the powerful book he leadeth me by father walter shizek the series follows shizek an american priest and missionary through his imprisonment and subsequent enslavement in the soviet union during world war ii and the cold war his story is one of ultimate surrender and participants in the challenge are called to surrender their worries anxieties problems and lives to god our very own dr peterson’s wife Tammy was recently featured in pray 40 where she shares her story about being diagnosed with terminal cancer and how she personally surrendered to god the hallow app is truly transformative and will help you connect with your faith on a deeper level so what are you waiting for join hallows pray 40 challenge today download the hallow app at hallow.com slash jordan and you’ll receive an exclusive three month free trial and hear Tammy peterson’s story of personal surrender that’s hallow.com slash jordan and okay so i’m gonna i’m gonna double down on this again because um it’s so it’s such a crucial problem and it’s so difficult to solve so i knew this woman named Joan mccourt dr Joan mccord and she was one of the first female phd criminologists and i know her when she was quite an elderly woman and and she had taught at temple university for years and she was a pioneer in the field and she did this study in a place called summersville in massachusetts and back in the late 30s and it was the first large-scale social intervention program to address what would you say to ameliorate the circumstances of children in neighborhoods where anti-social personality and criminality and addiction were a likely consequence of the of the disarray in that environment okay so they set up on paper the the intervention looked wonderful they they there were literacy programs for the children there were parenting programs for the parents there were social skills programs for the children they tried to offer them the resources they needed to be successful in a way that you would expect intelligent people to offer those resources and they went above and beyond the call of duty you might say they took all the kids out of summerville and took them to summer camps out of the city for two weeks a year you know to give them some immersion in nature and a chance to get away and and everyone loved the program the kids loved it the parents loved it the teachers who were involved loved it the social services types who and the psychologists etc who were involved they thought this was a bang up but they did they did one fatal thing which is they actually built evaluation into the program and so they assigned the people randomly to treatment and non-treatment group and then after the program had run for a couple of years they revealed the results of the study to themselves and this the kids in the treatment group did worse on almost every measure right and so they were absolutely shocked and it turned out like it took a couple of years to figure out exactly what had happened but what had happened was that taking all the kids who were most prone to criminality and putting them together for two weeks in a camp was a school for criminality right and that effect was so detrimental that it obliterated not only obliterated the effects of all the interventions but reduced them and so reversed them so Joan McCord Dr. McCord spent a lot of the rest of her life traveling around talking to politicians for example in positions like yours saying look whenever you introduce any intervention whatsoever make sure you budget for evaluation because just because your intervention makes sense doesn’t mean it’s going to work now you alluded to the fact earlier that you believe and this is part of what makes me so skeptical I worked with a group of criminologists centered in Montreal for seven years looking at the genesis of antisocial behavior the treatment of addiction all these sorts of things with really well qualified people and one of the things I really learned was don’t be so sure your stupid intervention is going to do what you hope it does and nothing else typical conservative attitude in some ways right law of unintended consequence so I’m wondering what systems of evaluation you guys have built in really on the scientific side like are you in a position where you can track the results of what it is that you’re doing and like is there a team that’s involved in helping you do that and if so you know what have you done and what are the what are the results of your evaluation so far how do you and how do you know they’re credible even no it’s a great question it’s the right question too and I you know speaking as a longtime cabinet minister you’re right I mean often we’re investing in programs with the best of intentions but you can end up making things worse particularly in files like we’re talking about you know I if you’re really interested in this I hope eventually get an opportunity to sit down with minister Williams who’s leading it specifically on the work we’re doing on addictions but I will tell you on the other side of the file the reality is we have not done a good job as a province on the statistic side this to me is what’s actually most alarming and so we are right now diligently putting in statistical systems all across our housing and homeless shelter spectrum so we can understand the numbers and we’re starting this with obviously this tent city process because we’ve been able to build the new navigation centers where we got good ability to build to do statistics on site and understand what’s going on and we are going to evaluate that program based on its results but one step further we’ve done underneath Priemer Smith is we are putting in evaluation programs across our entire social services system on results particularly on results when it comes to actually recovery and that could be beyond just addictions that could be you know in the case we’re working on individuals who are obviously on our welfare programs what that would look like is well how many people within these programs are ending up back at work you’re you’re asking us for an investment of millions of dollars for work placements well the proof is how many people are coming off the rolls every year and so if you’re coming back up to me as the minister is saying I need this many more million dollars a year above population growth well clearly why am I investing in your employment programs right and so you know there’s been a lot of good programs like that my big ministry that I think are worth looking at but we are not going to allow it to continue without clear assessments based on results and you know we’re about at six seven months into that process as a department since I took over this ministry and I really believe over the next few years we’ll see much more ability to answer that question but you’re 100 correct I would I would say one of the things I’ve learned in my time in this file is that we actually can’t answer that question with credibility now we of course we have to keep helping people we can’t stop you know we’re not going to let people freeze to death and we’re not going to let children live on the streets and we have to deal with these issues but if we want results we got to lay out the target we got set the goals and we got to hold the people that we’re funding accountable as a taxpayer based on results and so that’s not just people in beds it’s how you’re getting them out of the beds it’s how you’re ending up making sure that they don’t end up having to be in the system no more because I think that’s what everybody wants yeah yeah well that’s a very very tricky problem so you know I worked for your department was all right in 1984 well let me tell you that story because it’s germane to what we’re discussing so I was just I had just graduated from the University of Alberta with my undergraduate psychology degree and I worked for social services in the summer helping them design an evaluation program for daycare oh yeah yeah and so I was an intern there for four months and I got to know the assistant deputy minister we got along quite nicely and she liked me and and I worked hard and then they hired me for a whole year as an independent consultant and so then I worked on developing the evaluation system for the daycare programs in Alberta for a year but there was something else I did at the same time because she gave me a side job which was a very comical job I’ll tell you because the year before Deloitte had been commissioned by the province to do a comprehensive evaluation of the social services provision and so Deloitte charged the provincial government some rate that you can well imagine would be commensurate with what consulting services like Deloitte charge and they produced a bunch of numbers about what was spent and what the effects were and so forth that were hypothetically measurements and then my boss at the time said could you update these numbers and I thought well that’s a pretty funny request because I’m not Deloitte but I could give it a shot and so I did that over a few months and the first thing I found out was that none of those numbers were real the the social so for example social services could not answer a basic question this is one of the questions she wanted answered I think her name was Melanie Hots if I remember correctly yeah and she was a very sharp lady this woman and one question she wanted to answer was what percentage of what social the department of social services spends ends up in the hands of the beneficiaries and so the basic question was well does social services spend 95 percent of its money supporting social service bureaucrats and five percent on the delivery of direct services and the answer was well here’s a number but no one has any idea whatsoever if that number is accurate so I updated this report at believe me a fraction of the costs that Deloitte had charged and with a hell of a lot more accuracy and number but it was it was a shock to me I was only about 20 at the time something like that 84 22 and I was shocked about two things I was shocked first that I was hired to do that second that I could do it better than Deloitte and third that the whole bloody department was blind it had no notion whatsoever of the relationship between its inputs and its outputs now that’s the problem in some ways that’s the problem with a government intervention system that’s unmoored from the discipline of of private enterprise right because there’s no customer to give you feedback but the reason I’m bringing that up is because well just to my suspicions are that not much has changed since and that and that now you made allusion to the fact that you are putting these evaluation systems into okay that’s the question to what degree do you think that the department of social services knows the ministry of social services knows what it’s spending and what what it’s getting for the for its dollar is does it know at all so it I think it would depend on the area of the department I think that in some areas particularly where we’re focusing on things like children with disabilities people with development disabilities and some of the contracts that we do around that where it’s easier to measure that the direct results you know we can we can definitely show you clear statistics of the investment that we put into affordable housing and how many people are living within the you know as a result of those investments but as you get more into these complicated areas I I’m very comfortable saying that I think we need to do more that I will also say though I think Alberta is one of the best in our country at it and part of that is because after 1984 as you get in the 90s along comes a fiscal revolution inside our province led by former premier Ralph Klein which really made our social services system operate a little bit more different than many other provinces we became much more comfortable working with outside agencies I think I probably run one of the biggest social services departments that relies on non-profits including even faith-based organizations we’re comfortable working with those organizations and that started in the Ralph era where they would go hey let’s not hire union people to run our emergency shelters let’s go work with the Salvation Army let’s go work with these other organizations inside the province to do so and so there became a little of a culture to be able to actually go out work a little bit more outside of that scope of that union bureaucracy type of thing that you would see in most departments I am in no way claiming that we’ve done that all the way but I think it’s a different culture that we see in Alberta yeah well that’s a culture of distributed responsibility which is a good conservative principle right is that all of this that doesn’t have to be centralized shouldn’t and that’s part of that’s part of providing people with what would you say the responsibilities that actually give them meaningful lives right you don’t want the centralized agencies to be giving handouts and and offering what would you call what would you call security and stability to people so that they don’t have to provide it for themselves it’s not going to work and it’s not good for them okay okay so you’re now let’s let’s turn if you would let’s turn to a bit of a bit of a broader issue now you guys in the last couple of weeks last week even um have have started somewhat of a fire in Canadian politics because your leader Danielle Smith has come out with policies that have upset the compassionate left let’s put it that way now my understanding is that she has tightened up the restrictions on offering so-called this is like one of the biggest verbal lies i’ve ever heard so-called gender affirming care which means exactly the opposite by the way by any reasonable standard by tightening up the ability by restricting the ability of those who would offer the opportunity to transform themselves physically by tightening up the provision of that service to children to minors now that’s caused quite the outcry not least among Justin Trudeau’s minions and faux compassionate butchers to put it bluntly can you tell me a little bit about more about the nature of that policy how you guys organized yourself so that you had enough gall and courage to manage this because it’s a very rare thing that’s being done and what you think the response is going to be well first let me say we got a very rare premier and she’s pretty brave i think she’s shown that several times in her last year or so but this issue would probably be the biggest where she’s uh being able to do that i also want to be clear i believe my premier is standing where the vast majority of certainly Albertans are uh and where the vast majority of i think Canadians are and probably beyond that but certainly the people that we work for which is Albertans the vast majority agree particularly my constituents i think that uh where she’s headed is in the right direction which is to recognize that children are children it’s some you know we restrict children from making other decisions that have significant impact on their lives until they’re at a spot where they can uh from maturity level brain development level all those things that you understand better than me frankly but you know we tell our kids when they could drink for example our provinces i mean we determine when those things could take place and i don’t think that anybody that is thinking about this in a reasonable way finds it at all that bizarre that we would do the same for something as drastic as changing one’s body permanently when they are below the age of 18 i mean this is a thing that a 12 or 13 year old is should not be put in a spot to do yet it doesn’t make any sense the other thing she’s done she’s blocked uh or she will be bringing forward our government uh not using hormone treatment for transgender purposes there could be other reasons below 18 where hormone treatment may be prescribed right but that obviously for medical reasons would continue but to say the same thing these decisions can take place after 18 and you know at its core this is about putting parents back into their children’s lives and that for me as a father inside this province is where this is at this should be about compassion at the end of the day we are talking about children and we need to be able to make sure that that we recognize that but we also know i mean look at the issues we just talked about today lots of those individuals i don’t think would ever come into counseling or any other process and say geez i wish my parents spent less time with me i wish my parents were less involved that’s just not true you know it’s going to be the opposite way and so making sure that we connect children with parents and let parents lead this process with their children is the right thing to do now i will recognize because what you’re going to hear from people who are upset is say well some children will get hurt there are bad parents sadly there is we’ve seen parents kill their children at times but the reality is that you don’t disconnect all the children from the good parents to deal with that minority situation where there’s bad parents we need to work through our children’s services system we need to protect children for sure and we need to interact in circumstances where children may not be being cared for properly but that you don’t do that by taking away children from their good parents for the good parents it doesn’t make any sense at all of course it’s just crazy well of course there’s bad parents there’s going to be a minority of psychopaths but there’s going to be just as many psychopaths among the social workers so you know that’s just i agree with you that’s why that argument makes me so mad well it’s a it’s an absolutely idiotic argument and it’s driven by an underlying notion that the state has the right to reconstruct humanity itself in the name of some utopian vision right there’s no excuse for it it’s appalling what are the exactly in detail to the degree that you can provide them what changed with premier smith’s new legislation in terms of restrictions like what did what exactly did she restrict and how are those restrictions on um on these mutilating and sterilizing procedures to be quite frank what are the restrictions that are now in place on those procedures so i think probably comes out to three main areas well four if you we can talk about sport in a minute but uh three main areas first is that parents in our province will have to be informed if their child is trying to talk about things like changing pronouns or these type of informed by schools correct that the that can’t be held back from parents parents need to know what is taking place with their children so that’s one yeah second is to ban underage any underage surgeries that would change either top or bottom is often how how we’ve expressed that surgeries that would change somebody’s body and then lastly was stopping hormonal treatments for the purpose of transition below for minor okay okay great now that’s so that’s okay so that is that already instantiated in legislation and that’s already happened or it has not happened it’s been announced that that’s what we’re going to do so that’s what the premier did she went out she made very clear where we’re going this is our intention and that we will be coming forward shortly with legislation to make that happen okay so one of the things i would recommend by the way and i know this is gratuitous advice but it might be useful don’t use top and bottom that’s a euphemism put forward by the by the psychopathic predators who are pushing this agenda it’s castration and mastectomy right got it and and use the blunt terms because it’s not cutesy top and bottom you know not in bit there’s nothing about what is being done on the surgical front that’s the least bit cutesy yeah and that you’re right to make clear that is it yeah taking a child’s body and permanently changing it removing partners or adding parts for for individuals that we actually at this moment would not even allow to make a decision to drink in a bar exactly exactly yes adding pseudo parts yeah yeah malfunctioning experimental pseudo parts right right and well at the moment at the same time pretending that they’re the same as the real thing which they’re not at all in any way right and then i want to add the fourth thing that she’s doing that we’re doing so our government under our premier’s leadership which is to make sure that women can participate in their sports and not be in a circumstance where an intact biological male and or a former biological male can come along and participate in their sports and so in our province we don’t want to be a spot where hard-working female athlete is all of a sudden in a an m&a fight with a guy my size i mean it’s and i think that again i want to react it’s insane 84 i believe is the last poll i saw of my provincial neighbors who agree with these points and so i actually don’t believe this is that controversial i think people want to make a controversial but anytime that we’re standing up for minor children and parents working in their children’s lives i think we’re in the right spot so i can share a little bit of my experience on that front with you guys um so here’s so you’re gonna you and you’re already in this you’re gonna get a lot of angry narcissistic psychopaths screeching at you and they’re going to make a lot of noise and they’re going to attempt to damage your moral reputations if you apologize or back off you’ll lose they’ll win if you hold your course it’ll be real intense for about a month and then everything will shift radically in your favor and you’ll be seen as pioneers if you can just tolerate that intermediary period of boiling oil you know the sorts of epithets that that trudeau and his demented dimwits are are are what are hurling your way you’re going to come out of this you’re going to come out of this as the most forward looking amongst the most forward-looking political leaders not only in canada but in north america and you could make a big bloody difference all across the continent and maybe in the west more broadly so i would say all the noise you’re generating that’s a sign that you’ve hit the target very squarely i agree with you and i i can assure you that the premier and her cabinet are 100 dedicated to protect this is about protecting kids in our mind and and that if we can’t do that as leaders we have no business being in these jobs and so we’re we’re very comfortable we’re going to stay the course we’re going to protect the children of alberta and we’re going to continue to make sure this is the best province in our country to live in okay so so to one final question what proportion of the tent cities do you think you’ve dealt with already and how fast do you think this process is going to rule out so we’ve got a little over 200 of these tent cities down already i think where the last last report i saw is we got about another 78 to go now what’s going to happen now we’re going to start to see them try to pop back up again so there’s going to be another round where we’re going to go in there and this is one of the reasons why we’re not playing around with notice that this is not acceptable in our cities and we will move quickly to support the police to take down the next round and eventually people will learn that’s what’s going to take place and then i think you’ll see two things happen you’ll probably see some of this pressure move into our underground transit systems and we’re going to move the same way there we’re going to say that’s not going to be acceptable here we’re going to use the same process we’re going to support the police to get people to supports and then i suspect what happens we’ll probably start to see some pop-ups just for nights and then they move and at that point we’ve had success with permanent tent cities and then we’ll reevaluate where we go next and so i we’re very dedicated to this my boss bremer smith has told me this must be done and when she tells me something’s going to be done it’s going to be done all right all right well it sounds like the next person from your government that i could talk to and should perhaps if he’d be willing as minister Williams yes so we could set that up and i know he he’s a big fan and is would be excited to do it in fact he’s probably a little irritated with me that i got to go first so if you get him up he’ll be excited all right all right well i think we should i think we should definitely set that up and then we should probably also do another podcast with the with the minister responsible for higher education because we could have a very fun conversation about that too i would i would like to watch that one so anyway i can help get that connected let’s do that let’s do both of those let’s do both of those i thought this went very well and so thank you very much for your time today and for answering all my impertinent questions and for walking through all of this in detail i’m hoping that alberta can provide a model for the rehabilitation of these tent cities across north america because people really don’t know what to do you know and you guys have a pretty comprehensive plan now you know it’s reasonable to be skeptical about it because you’re dealing with a hard problem but the fact that you’ve already removed 200 of 300 tent cities you know that shows some real will here and it doesn’t look to me like you’ve taken a particularly severe beating on the public front for doing this right it’s caused a lot less fewer for example than premier smith’s move on the on the transgender affirming front it’s it certainly has been quieter i will tell you it’s exactly what you said we we got hit real hard the first couple days as we announced it was really loud yeah and we just stayed the course because we knew we were doing the right thing and and you know both the chief of police and emmerton and myself have received more positive correspondence on this than any other issue i’ve done in my 10 years and go that well there you go that’s so well that’s the advantage of doing the the long-term right thing like people will swing around behind you if you can if you can withstand that initial trial by fire all of these things they’re great opportunities right because if you can see a serious problem and you can offer a solution then you know you’ve actually done your job and wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing yep exactly more of us should probably do it yeah well we should also set up a talk with the minister of energy because i can help with all that let’s let’s do that because daniel also offered um announced when i was in alberta with carlson and with uh with lord conrad black that that that alberta is planning to double its gas and oil production and that’s a real slap in the face to stephen guilbao and he’s certainly an individual who richly deserves at least one and so i think we could have a very productive conversation about the true benefits of the fossil fuel industry in alberta and what and how canada could thrive and truly thrive and offer its its resources to the world if um you know if if canadians could get their head screwed on straight about just exactly what was what and so yeah let’s do all of those that would be good i will my guys are in the room with me here right now so we’ll know them all we’ll connect them with the people i spent three years as minister of environment alberta so guilbao was one of my counterparts uh we won’t get into that today but i’ve got a few stories and this is not a friend of this province oh that’s for sure he is uh he’s not a friend of canadians where they’re headed is is to a very dark place uh dark and cold a dark and cold i was about to say and very cold place so yeah well said we’ll get you connected with everybody though okay okay so for everybody watching and listening you’ll know uh if you’ve attended other podcasts that i’m going to take another half an hour with my guest on the daily wire plus side and we’re going to talk about the genesis of his political career and i would say also his hopes for the future because i’d like to know about that and the conservative vision in alberta for the future and so if you’d be inclined to join us for the additional half an hour behind the daily wire paywall you’d be more than welcome to do that and you could throw a little support the daily wire plus way which i would also recommend because they are at at minimum a bastion of the free speech that is becoming increasingly difficult to come by in our society and that is threatened more and more on platforms like youtube which still has the good graces to offer the sorts of things that we’re discussing today so join us there and thank you very much sir i’m looking to your colleagues you bet yeah thanks for the forthright discussion bye bye