RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - Canada: On The Road To Separation?

Oct. 24, 2019 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer

21:26

Canada: On The Road To Separation?

Special guest Tyler Hamilton ("Thamster") joins the Group to discuss the recent Canadian elections, Justin Trudeau's perilous majority, and the rising tide of secessionist sentiment in Quebec and Western Canada. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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	It is October 24th, and this is another edition of the McSpencer Group.
	Joining the panel once again are Richard Spencer and Mark Brahman.
	And a new entry into the legendary McSpencer Group is Tyler Hamilton, a student of philosophy, a published author on the Countercurrents website.
	He's here today to help us talk about the recent election in Canada, to tell us what's happening with our neighbors to the north, or if Augustus Invictus has his way, our future property.
	Tyler, welcome to the program.
	How are you doing?
	I'm pretty well.
	How are you guys?
	So as regards the recent election, as I understand it, obviously being outside of Canada, Richard, Mark, myself are not quite as plugged in, but there were some surprises with the turnout, particularly as it relates to the Bloc Quebecois.
	I don't want to jump too far ahead, but why don't you just let the audience know who the players were, what was at stake, and how things turned out.
	Well, it was very interesting, and pretty much all the polls were entirely wrong about what would actually go down.
	Two kind of contradictory opinions in Canada about how this would play out.
	One was that Trudeau's latest scandals with the SNC-Lavalin Affair, which was this company in Quebec that was essentially paying off Gaddafi to get contracts.
	And of course, this corporation is based out of Quebec.
	And so Trudeau, not wanting to get into an election scandal with this prosecution coming out, he essentially blackmailed the prosecutor.
	And so there was that scandal about it.
	Now she's demoted.
	She's gone.
	After she went through with the prosecution, she didn't bend, and now she's gone.
	And then there was, of course, the blackface scandal, which to me doesn't really mean anything.
	But to these kind of politics in Canada, it does.
	But regardless, one side was saying he was going to lose a lot of support for that.
	The other side was saying he was going to be a liberal majority.
	NDP was going to be third place as usual, and conservatives might step up a little, but they were going to lose again.
	None of these things happened.
	Pretty much what had happened was...
	Completely surprising.
	Liberals won a minority government, and so they're on very shaky grounds.
	I don't predict that's going to last very long at all, actually.
	And reasons I'll get into later.
	But the Bloc Quebecois, the Quebec Nationalist Party, well, they're coming out of a separatist party, but they're taking a more nationalist line, trying to just push for their sovereignty and what they want the federal government to do on their behalf.
	They're pushing for more of that instead of pushing separatism.
	And they're in a very interesting position.
	And they sweeped entirely all of Quebec.
	And it greatly knocked down all the roles down to a minority position.
	So now you have the bloc, Quebec Ward, and they beat out the NDP.
	And on the other side of that, Alberta and Saskatchewan are extremely pissed off.
	And in about one day, on October 21st, the separatist movement was at about 1,000 people joining their ranks.
	And overnight, it went up to a little over 100,000.
	There's a lot of interesting things going on right now in selection.
	To be quite honest, this was the best thing that could have came out of it, which we can get into, I suppose.
	Well, let's start with that right away, because at least my read on Twitter was that many conservative types, Canadian conservatives, were very frustrated by the results.
	Why should conservatives, right-wingers, or heritage Canadians be happy about this outcome?
	So what you had with this election was there was a race last year between, sorry, the year before, for the Conservative Party leadership between Maxime Bernier and Andrew Scheer.
	And Andrew Scheer is the lukewarm, milquetoast Conservative.
	He has no fighting spirit in him whatsoever.
	He's an incredibly boring guy.
	Bernier, on the other hand, is kind of like the faux populace trying to take on this kind of Trump role for Canada.
	So what had happened was Bernier lost by 1%.
	Of the vote.
	And he said, OK, well, we're not going to get what we want as Conservatives in the CPC.
	So he left any form that's called the People's Party of Canada, the PPC, which I was involved in myself for some time.
	And the CPC, on the other hand, the route that they were taking with this election was they didn't want to change the immigration numbers.
	They still want 1.2 million immigrants in the next three years.
	She actually said that, you know, Trudeau's numbers are great.
	Yeah, he still wants to go along with the climate accord, the Paris Agreement.
	Everything that Albertan and Saskatchewan conservatives disliked about the Trudeau government, Scheer actually wanted the exact same thing.
	But the interesting thing about Scheer, why he was so damaging, why him winning would have been far worse, is because he was trying to carry out a program of depoliticizing the election, saying, well, we're doing this for the economy.
	We don't want to think about partisan politics.
	This isn't about...
	You know, warring ideals.
	We're all Canadians.
	So this is all about what will work for the economy.
	And that was the worst thing about them.
	And then Bernier, on the other hand, which he stood absolutely no chance.
	And frankly, I didn't want to either because the PPC, well, it's running under this kind of faux nationalism, right?
	So he was saying it's all about Canadian heritage and Canadian ideals and who we are as a people.
	And then you push him on this.
	What he meant was, you know, we need a free market.
	We need to get rid of our system of supply management.
	We need to open up the market to the states.
	And he was saying we all come from immigrants, right?
	He was basically repeating the same dogma about Canada that the left was doing, except he wanted some kind of Trumpism.
	And anyone familiar with Canadian history and conservatism in Canada, Canada is traditionally, anyways, historically, our conservative parties have actually been very anti-free market, while the liberals, on the other hand, were more in line with American classical liberalism.
	They wanted to open up.
	And that's actually what happened in 1962 with the election battle between Diefenbaker and Lester Pearson, partly on behalf of John Kennedy, trying to put armed nuclear missiles in Canada during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
	And that's what toppled Diefenbaker, and that's ultimately what toppled Canadian traditionalist conservatism.
	But regardless, the Conservative Party has been lost ever since then.
	The PPC tried to kind of harken back to this, but...
	Bernier's proposal of a One Canada vision was basically the same problem that Diefenbaker had, was the fact that Canada was comprised of ethnicities that wanted to preserve their identity in this kind of very uneasy alliance.
	And he wanted to act like there was no distinction between these ethnicities and there's nothing you could do to protect their values.
	Instead, we have a shared Canadian heritage, which simply doesn't exist.
	So Bernier's vision is very...
	Under the guise of nationalism, does not go at all with Canadian nationalism.
	So on the one hand, if you had PPC rising, which again, they had no point, they had no hope, they were only there for a year, they couldn't have possibly did it, you would have had this kind of Americanism.
	And then if you had the CPC, you would have had the exact same things about Trudeau, other than the fact that people would fall for it because it's a spectacle wrapped in conservatives fighting Trudeau.
	Canadian conservatives all think this stems from Trudeau.
	So you would not have had the anger in the very interesting political situation we have now, which is essentially two provinces that are being shafted, and they do have seats, not as much as the Liberals, but they do have seats in Parliament, and they do have power now.
	And our own Premier in Alberta, he's essentially, he was the Immigration Minister for Harper, and he was a part of largely the same kind of multicultural shifts happening in Canada.
	And so his legitimacy is starting to wane as well.
	And so he's in a very tough spot.
	So this is quite possibly the best thing that could have happened is delegitimizing the CPC and showing that the PPC did not offer a solution either.
	So there is no better situation that could happen than what's happening right now.
	Just as a quick follow-up question, obviously the Bloc Québécois, they've been politically kind of insolvent for quite some time, and there was some strong resurgence there.
	But in preparing for this program, I also saw that there's a kind of a separatist movement in Alberta as well.
	Is this something that there's a legitimate chance for Albertans to break away?
	I think it's going to force the parties that they're going to have to adopt a very different strategy if they want to remain in power.
	Because if you follow all the Canadian news and all the talking heads right now, they're essentially saying, look, we have to put aside our differences.
	You know, Trudeau went again as a minority government.
	We have all these different voices from all these different parties.
	And we need to work together to solve this.
	The problem is it's impossible to do that.
	And actually, the complete wild card in this situation is to block Quebec war.
	I actually think they're more interesting than the Alberta separatists.
	But I don't think they have much of a chance.
	I mean, they're kind of taking hold of this kind of Trumpian And I think that's largely damaging to them.
	And regardless, it's forcing the parties to actually have to deal with the fact that the minority government could topple.
	The NDP has said they don't want a collision with the liberal government, and so they have no recourse to hold on to their power.
	So something's going to have to happen, and it's a very uneasy situation.
	But in case a referendum comes up over Western separation, I don't think it will go through.
	Regardless, Bloc Quebecois has, I think, the upper hand in this.
	Let me throw out some big ideas, and you can either find them interesting, or you could say, ah, Richard knows next to nothing about Canada, despite the fact that he actually lived in Ontario for a little while there, around 10 years ago.
	But I'm just thinking about these dynamics at play, There's a history of American federalism, like, properly understood.
	Not federalism as Hamilton understood it, but federalism in the sense of different regions having greater autonomy and generally not liking each other and having different economic interests, etc.
	And, you know, that is definitely at play with Canada.
	There is a French-speaking kind of separatist...
	energy in Quebec that has a lot to do with culture and language and the idea of whether we're French or we're Anglos is being fought out there.
	Then we also have a natural resource battle.
	Of course, the great maple syrup fields and mining of maple syrup occurs in The West in Alberta.
	I'm just joking, it's oil, but maybe many of our audience just were like, yeah, yeah, that's probably right.
	They're fracking syrup.
	And yet all of the waffles are made in Quebec.
	We're all one community, really.
	But no.
	So, you have this kind of idea that we're producing all the energy, we're producing all the money, and yet we're redistributing it to these French-speaking jerks who are complete snobs and hate us and whatever.
	So, there are these kind of energies like that.
	And then there's this other massive trend, which is multiculturalism.
	And I remember talking with Peter Brimo about this, actually, while we were in Toronto, of all places.
	And he was saying...
	You know, in the late 80s and 90s, they would talk about, oh, look, we're a multicultural society.
	And they would kind of marry the mass immigration question with the, you know, Quebec question in a way.
	Like, oh, it's a multicultural Canada, whatever.
	But, you know, they would almost, you know, you'd think that it was a bait and switch.
	You think they were talking about Quebec.
	They're really talking about Jamaican immigrants, etc.
	And so you have this...
	Kind of country that's generally unhappy, that's being divided, that's getting polarized, just like the United States.
	But then it's going to be a lot of those energies...
	Can't be expressed or articulated in the way that they should be.
	They can't be articulated in the sense of, we don't want all this mass immigration.
	I mean, Canada has the same immigration levels as the United States, and it has less than a third of the population.
	I mean, that's remarkable.
	1.2 million is more or less what the United States takes in.
	And what is the population of Canada?
	What is it, 60 million?
	I don't know off the top of my head.
	Including Eskimos and Igloos, I think it is, yeah, 60 million.
	And every citizen owns four or five canoes.
	But, sorry, I'm just getting all the dad jokes out here at once.
	I'll return that.
	We did actually take a canoe down a sledding hill near my house.
	It's a big seven hill, so we...
	Man, four people on the canoe and just went down this big hill on the snow and you go really fast on this canoe.
	Right.
	That's how you travel.
	This conversation is taking on an anti-Semitic turn.
	Yeah.
	So there are kind of two issues.
	There's like the natural federalism and division that's regional and linguistic.
	And then there's this new thing thrown into the pot, which is Canada's multicultural experiment.
	And what Peter Brimley was saying is that in the 80s and 90s, they would talk about multiculturalism, even though Toronto at that time was still...
	Now it's not.
	I mean, I don't even know what Toronto is like now.
	When I lived there 10 years ago, it was remarkably multicultural and truly multicultural, not biracial.
	And so you have these kind of two forces, and yet, you know, the people can't really articulate what their problem is.
	And so all of that energy goes into things like regional separatism and regional hatred and rivalry.
	That's my view from the perspective of an American ignoramus.
	Yeah, I mean, partly the whole multicultural act was an attempt to deal with putback.
	Canada was always founded on these different ethnic identities that didn't have much in common other than they didn't want to be American.
	I think English-speaking Canadians have a This is why they're so wrapped up in the Trump rhetoric, is they have a very hard time understanding that they're not Americans.
	The French, on the other hand, and this is why I'm going to say the Bloc Quebecois is a complete wild card in this situation.
	Because if you look at the history of Quebec and Quebec nationalism, and it's important to remember the Bloc Quebecois was acting more as a nationalist party within Canada than a separatist one at this point.
	But they were traditionally Catholic.
	And then around the time of the 60s, you had these kind of anti-colonial uprisings going around the world.
	And so they said, OK, well, we're subjugated in our nation.
	We want our own anti-colonial uprising.
	That's where you got the terrorist groups like Front Through Quebecois that were all a left-wing nationalism.
	They were Marxist-Leninists.
	They engaged in assassinations and bombings and things like this.
	And they also, of course, had the parties at the time.
	that were pushing for Quebec separatism.
	And so that kind of energy remained in Quebec.
	They're a very secular left-wing nationalism, but they're also very wrapped up in their own language and their culture, and that's something they want to preserve.
	And this is why I get to the fact that they're the biggest wildcard in this election, is because the current premier, his last name is Le Gault, I'm not sure how to pronounce it, so I don't really want to try, but like Francois Le Gault or something like that, he used to run the nationalist separatist party in Quebec.
	And now he left thinking, okay, well, I have a better chance at power at the premier because I'm going to force the Bloc Quebecois to act as a nationalist bulwark for Quebec at the federal level.
	And so you take the Liberals and the NDP, they're for mass immigration and they're for, you know, the Paris Accords and things like that.
	And so Alberta and Saskatchewan hates that.
	But also at the same time, They're anti-mass immigration.
	So they're kind of playing the role in between both.
	They're against the pipelines, but they're also against mass immigration.
	And they have power now.
	And that's really going to shake things up.
	And in fact, the Premier knew this was going to happen.
	So if you want to appeal to the Quebec people, you want to give them their sense of sovereignty.
	One thing you have is that the Liberals and the NDP are both in agreement, although they're not in agreement on the mechanism to do it, to basically force Quebec to change their laws that you can't, for example, wear a hijab in court.
	That's one major thing.
	They want to force Quebec on the heel.
	And CPC, actually, to a lesser extent, while they don't agree with it, they have said they're not doing anything about it.
	But they also want to make it so...
	They have veto power over the federal government on any immigration requirements that they want to put on Quebec.
	So you basically have this left-wing nationalism in Quebec.
	And they're going to act, I think, as a very interesting bulwark to whatever the CPC or the Liberals or the NDP want to do.
	And you're not going to be able to push through a strong government that's going to last very long.
	And I think that'll lead to a vote of no confidence.
	But what's going to replace that?
	Don't know.
	This is what's so interesting to me about this, is there is no answer.
	So the other interesting aspect, maybe looking forward to seeing how Trudeau's policies, whether they're successful or not, he took office as a kind of radical climate change activist, but he also supported the construction of the pipeline.
	I do believe that he initiated the carbon tax.
	This has been kind of one of many sticking points for Trudeau in terms of being able to deliver on campaign promises to fulfill his kind of mandate as the progressive president.
	Well, he gave a speech today.
	Actually, I think it was just a couple of hours ago on this.
	And he was asked about it by a reporter.
	We need to work together to find the solution.
	And I mean, there's no way for me to say what the future on this is, because ultimately there isn't a solution on this, right?
	Just a few days ago, we had Greta Thunberg in my city, right?
	And there was a truck convoy counter-protest.
	They made a painted mural of her, and actually it's already been defaced like a day later.
	And no one's buying Trudeau that you could just somehow get past it, right?
	Like, it's not going to happen.
	There's nothing that we could do to get around it, right?
	And this is partly why I've been supporting the North American Compact that's a part of Augustus'campaigns.
	Because regardless of how these parties are forced to change, we've been...
	I've had this conversation with many kind of normal conservatives around Alberta.
	I just read them the platform of the North American Compact.
	On board like that, right?
	Because they don't see a future in this uneasy union.
	And frankly, I don't see there as much as sad as it is for me to say.
	I'm sorry, but at this rate, this union can't hold.
	And if it needs, it tries to hold, then one of these kind of these various blocks of regional identities, one of them is going to have to undergo severe repression and trauma just to stay in this union because there's no way they're going to get what they want.
	And there will probably be Alberta and Saskatchewan, and they are full of all kinds of resentment right now.
	It's actually in a bigger, say, North American union structure in which local regions could have greater autonomy, is again the irony.
	Again, when you say won Canada or won the United States, it's this nationalism that you are forcing together different regions that might very well not get along.
	And larger blocks can be an answer to this.
	There's a reason why Scottish nationalists want to leave the UK but want to remain in the EU and things like that.
	I mean, that is a definite dynamic to this whole thing.
	Yeah, and it should be said that Ontario needs Alberta, not the other way around.
	That's one thing that's missed when you talk to people in Ontario.
	That's why I go back to the de-equalization payments.

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