https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=5efyUt5YDU0
but his relationship to the working people, the oilmen, the loggers, the fishermen, the farmers, the service people, the truckers, he is an anathema to the man. And by the way, he’s hurt the reputation and the historical legacy of the party he represents. And I’m not an NDP’er, but 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 favour of the Emergencies Act because they realised, well, they realised that that allows instantaneously for the demonisation and the criminalisation of anything like organised labour protests. And so obviously… Hello, everyone. I’m here today with the 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. And we’re going to talk today about Canada and the Canadian government and try to get to the bottom of what’s happening in so far 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 sense, in any case. So 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. And it appears now that it’s perhaps 90% less so. The current data, insofar as you can trust it, suggests that vaccines are approximately 35% effective against Omicron. And I think that is, I think, the most effective against Omicron infection and perhaps 70% against hospitalization. So that’s the reality of the pandemic. And I’ll add one more thing and then turn it over to you for a minute. Well, 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, and then also in the last two weeks in Canada, in Saskatchewan, Alberta, Quebec, Ontario, and PEI. And 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. And I’m not being cute. 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 a fairly, in many ways, a fairly tyrannical premier at the end of his days. And 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 you 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 that after two years and very sporadically effective measures, don’t take the mask, they’ll hurt you, take the mask, ignoring the old age homes, the economic ruin that’s going on. And after we go through two whole years of this absurd variant, you mentioned the Omnicron 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. And so at the tail, and also as you mentioned, some of the provinces in Canada, and at this point, a single group, the trucks, 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 say, no, I have occupation in this two years, all these things are going away. And instead, their livelihoods are threatened, their actual livelihoods. And then I’ve got to get this in, 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, the supplies for the hospitals. So of all the people to single out, the working class trucker, and then they go across Canada in the middle of 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 are 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 we have prided ourselves ever so much that we’re so polite, that we’re so compromising, we say sorry when someone else hits us. So where did the ethic, the intrinsic ethic of the Canadian temperament disappear? And instead, instead of saying, oh my god, what a joy it would be to talk to someone who’s not in cabinet, 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. And instead, this is the thing that really got my temporal instead out of the blue, like some dark wizard, he comes down on them, they’re racists, they’re misogynist. They’re only a small fringe when they’re taking up space, and we can’t tolerate that. I do not know, I really do not. I do not know what was in his mind, what was in the minds of his superlative advisors, presuming that they have them. And 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 fishermen in lagers and miners and oil workers and truckers, they’re a class. Does no one stand up for them and instead 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 tossed at the Ottawa protest, it turns me upside down. One more final point, now 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, 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, it’ll prevent 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. So you and I were told a couple of months ago that my advisors to high level government officials that the COVID policy was essentially being dictated by opinion poll, which is something we can get back to this reliance by government leaders now on experts and on opinion polls. We’ll talk, 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 US, that none of that was occurring in Canada at all until the truckers started this protest. And so 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, is that we know that this has been run by opinion poll, which is a terrible way to run a government and that nothing had changed before the truckers started to protest. And so, and then we should also point out that we have an 86% 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% because 10% of the population is not in the condition necessary even to comply often voluntarily with mandates. And so it’s terrible naivety to assume that it can be pushed beyond that. And so, so let’s, 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, well, why did the truckers get demonized? And what are Canadians supposed to think about that? Especially because FinTrack, 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’s 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. And 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. And 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 what we, you talked about Trudeau’s state of mind with regards to the truckers. Like he’s accused the conservatives of supporting the people who wave swastikas and try 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 have a thousand or two thousand or three thousand people and there is a placard of, and the placard is not support, I don’t, I’m sorry you’ve been having to make this point. The placard has the swastika on it. It’s a nasty thing, but it’s implying that the government is the bunch. And the news media and Trudeau take this idiot and his scribbled damn swastika and they try 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. And they, oh by the way, I have to, this is one guy wearing a raccoon mask, walking around with the Confederate flag. It was absurd. It has no consequence whatsoever. And the truckers chased him away. Well, not only that. 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 idiotic. 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. 60 million, describing a 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, their yabs, their louts, 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, but 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 saying, 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 is 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. So here’s what our Prime Minister did last week. He permanently destroyed 20% 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. And 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 the seven things that happened last week that are of that magnitude. You can’t even keep up with them. And so let’s talk about this emergency for a minute. So, 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 the, 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. And so I’ll ask you to play devil’s advocate, okay, just for a minute. So imagine that you’re on the side of Trudeau and the Trudeau government, and you’re trying to make the case that this is an emergency that justifies the imposition of martial law. So what’s the emergency exactly? Tell me, give me some evidence that there’s an emergency of any sort. Carlson Even if, and I accept the challenge to be a devil’s advocate, let me just, let me really try. What is 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 a fleet of the highest gunnery and it’s 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 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 tranquilities 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, Christopher Yeltsin is supposed to be bright. 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 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 a 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. So even Advocatus Diabolus, I cannot do it because I cannot even in fantasy come up with a reason. I can’t do it. Let me try. So let’s say, all right, so this is a radical right-wing movement and it’s funded by mega-lap 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 no. Well, so does anyone believe that? Because I don’t get it. I don’t even see why this is a wise move strategically for the liberalists. 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 to sustain 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 set up 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. And now you’ll have, for example, Mr. Biden’s son with his contracts in these Chinese, not even to be mentioned. Here’s how it comes to be. This far white supremacy movement. I see the phrase white supremacy so often and I wonder, where is this coming from? There will always be some fanatically stupid set of people with some fanatically stupid cause, but there has not been, let me use this word, a pandemic of racist white challenge, but it’s been the fodder and the news speak and the woke dialect and it’s been shoved out so often that if you say the word MAGA now, this is where Lamedi comes in. He said, you know, if you’re pro Trumpian, I can go down to Newfoundland and go from Portobass to St. John’s and then up to St. Anthony’s and I will not meet anyone who is pro Trumpian. I mean, it’s silly, but if you have, as Catherine McKenna said, if you pound it hard enough and long 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, so 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 and 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 can 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 emergency act, is so preposterous a 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 Christia Freeland, the notion that this is going to go over well over a period of something approximating a month. So it’s got to be, 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. Well 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 of him but I heard enough people, who was a cabinet minister, Pierre Laporte, there was an English ambassador. Born as a Laporte, ends up in the trunk of a car having been shot. There were all sorts of various actions by the FLQ that certainly generated a justified anxiety and then 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 Rhin at the bar, 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 and 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 like movements like the 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, and 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 a big, big, big thing, he was stopped by some reporter, I presumably was going in, but 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’s just standing there, the two of them have this back and forth and the reporter is really pushing. And Trudeau, give him all the credit, and the way he’s pushing just as hard and almost nasty, we need liberals is one of the phrases that 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, 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 MAGA overthrow and Trumpian forces, there are 30 plus people in his cabinet, they can’t all share that fantasy. And if we have 30 people elevated, how else do you account for what they’re doing? Like because they have no bloody disaster. Because they genuflect. I put a note in the column that you kindly posted. I said, heroism, 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 a hero, but if you’re following the international press, we’re getting a real beating and happy days or 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 were 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. 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. And Sven Robinson, who’s part of that cohort a little later, but part of that cohort, also opposed it yesterday. And yet, Jagmeet Singh is, 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 got a fairly good memory. I remember Tommy Douglas, and when Trudeau brought down the War Measures Act, at least in English Canada, I mean, it had a lot of visceral and immediate approval, maybe because, you know, this is in Quebec, never mind the reasons. It was a winner in the majority of circumstances. But Tommy Douglas was from out west, remember. 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. So here’s 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 oilmen, the loggers, the fishermen, the farmers, the service people, the truckers, he is an anathema to the man. And by the way, he’s hurt the reputation and the historical legacy of the party he represents, and I’m not an NDP’er, but I can respect and know what they did, and I admire them for that. Even the Communist Party of Canada announced yesterday that they were 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. So obviously, and so, okay, so let’s talk about that Friday event, just because this actually really needs to be focused on. So 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, I hope they didn’t. They shouldn’t be flying home. They should have gone in a cluster, and they should have walked the streets, and they should have at least had conversations. Not anything else, just conversations. 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. And secondly, they should be at extreme volume. They have been tepid. They have been removed. There is no vigorous, 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 easy, 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 at Rio in Ottawa? Did that seem way too supreme to you? 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 rational 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 elaborate on that. Well, again, I’m 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, what justified this, what’s the big emergency? Well, I trace it back to the beginning. Once parliament, once COVID came, this kind of lazy and this tasteful of oversight government, I think that’s a fair thing to say. First of all, they 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 as 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- No budget for one year, right? Not to have any, and they skipped one year, but they asked for the powers for two years until they got slapped down. They had their SNC and their Wee 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 the pandemic a true crisis, the most important institution, not essential, quintessential, five times 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 and other wallcars, you send their names out. That is the ultimate- the Tories in particular should have been standing on those steps screaming at the top of their lungs, why is this building open? To open the house, to open the house. That’s right, that’s right. That’s what they’re there for. 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. Yeah, 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 from medical facts to valid policy. The only pathway from facts to policy is through parliament, through the executive branch and the- or the executive operations and the legislative operations, thinking through the problems in public in the House of Commons and in the provincial parliaments. That’s the pathway, not from the bloody science to the outcome, ever. So they could devolve all the responsibilities onto medical experts and claim compassion and wisdom in doing so and demonize people for not following the science. Yep. So that’s number one. It’s like, so now it’s government by fiat and government by experts 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. And 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. Don’t take a static, by the way, these polls are also highly suspect, believe that means. Highly methodologically suspect in like 10 different ways. I think I’ll 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. So 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’m an admirer 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 project designed to… Coastal Gas League. Yeah, the Coastal Gas League. Exactly. 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 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, and the cheaper that energy is, and 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. It’s like, 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 this bloody moralistic posturing is enough to drive you to distraction. Well, the analysis of the energy movement, I mean, it is so patrician and so patronizing, and so, by the way, it has 100% support from every possible major media, but it is a craze. And by the way, we just put in over 80 or 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 that things are really about to manifest themselves in their true nature. Well, 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 this 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, more angry divisions. We’ve had contests between provinces and we’ve had big fights over pipelines and transmission lines and all sorts of it, 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 I am going to build a tranquility founded in respect for all Canadians. 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. 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 the opposition is ineffectual in chaos. The NDP has abandoned the working class, the press in collusion with the government. Okay, so 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. And so the country was really tearing itself apart and I was in Alberta, 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. And 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. Give you a better one in a sense, but Lévesque was. He 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 Lohan, who in many ways was kind of an archetypal premier. He was a premier that basically filled a role, a 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, and 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 civility and compromise. That’s called Canada. And that is what happened in Canada, is that civility and compromise did prevail up to now. Yeah, and that was also back when tough was actually still… Yeah, that’s another story altogether. Right. Yeah, well, it’s definitely another story. 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, an 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. And 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, entire economy of the country. And that’s basically where we’re at. And I don’t think I can put a footnote on that. I’d say one, one or two things. I’m laughing, but I’m not. This is a sad, sad mess. And 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, that’s the biggest worry of all of this. And the convoy and the clearing of the protest is the nature of the country and the harmony that once it knew. 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, but I, 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 am much more pessimistic than you. We have to see, because this is in the middle. This is extremely dynamic. I wrote their little tiny thing, you know, we had Mr. Trudeau know 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 that the separatist party in Quebec is actually opposing this. The greatest Canadians in parliament are the separatists. I know I’m laughing, but I’m not. It’s a sad time. It’s a serious time. Well, 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 power building in the middle of minus 20 at my. 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 need to thank God for the working class. That’s what I think is what keeps the country working. And thanks for your time, Joe. Thanks for talking to me, Rex. Talk again soon, man.