Dr William Gairdner, noted Canadian author, returns to Freedomain Radio on the eve of the Canadian election to spell out everything that needs to be done to save Canada from socialism, relativism and the endless avoidance of middle-leading three party politics.
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| Hi everybody, it's Sven Molling from Freedom Aid Radio. | |
| The return of the bill. | |
| Bill Gerdner is back. | |
| Thank you so much. Good to see you again. | |
| And last time we talked about the trouble with Canada. | |
| But not wanting to seem too negative and doom and gloomy, we are now going to talk about the solutions. | |
| Now, people know my particular approach to political solutions, which we don't have to go into here. | |
| But given that we have a looming election, the second one in five years, and I believe Stephen Harper is... | |
| Probably right now on his knees praying for a majority, and there are very many Canadians who may not feel that the majority may be the best thing for Canada. | |
| But you have some thoughts, many thoughts I would imagine, about how Canada should move forward politically to solve its issues, and also what's not being talked about in the election, which is a pretty wide swath of important topics. | |
| Yeah. Okay, so why don't we do this? | |
| I have a sort of inventory of possible solutions. | |
| I'm not going to say that any of them is perfect. | |
| Nothing really is. | |
| But I think it's time that Last time I was here, I said it bothered me that Canadians strike me as a whole population that's in a car, that's traveling somewhere, but they don't really know where and they're all facing backwards. | |
| The whole point of suggesting solutions is to say, Let's turn around and grab the steering wheel. | |
| Let's take the country where we think it ought to go, rather than just being sort of victims of its motion, which is being directed by who knows who. | |
| I think in many policy areas it's not being directed by anybody. | |
| It's being directed by a cumulative set of mistakes. | |
| Well, and there's a momentum that occurs within politics, right? | |
| So particular entitled groups get particular benefits, and they then fight to hang on to and extend those benefits. | |
| And it's usually easier to just go along with it, because it's classic public choice problem, right? | |
| Which is, say, for instance, public sector unions. | |
| The benefits they receive are concentrated into a highly motivated group of people. | |
| But the way that they're paid for is diffused among the general population. | |
| Or like farm subsidies. The farmers make hundreds of thousands of dollars. | |
| You and I pay maybe 20 or 30 or 40 bucks a year. | |
| So their incentive to lobby for it is very high. | |
| Our incentive to impose it is very small. | |
| So it's sort of like death by a thousand mosquito bites. | |
| And I think there's a momentum of specialized group interest that drives politics a lot more than people like to admit. | |
| Well, I'm going to get to the public union situation shortly. | |
| Excuse me. No problem. | |
| Let me just maybe run through a few. | |
| I believe that the will of the people, which is never perfect, never without fault, etc., etc., but the idea of a parliamentary system like we have, which comes out of the British tradition, is that the laws should be an expression in some way, shape, or form of the will of the people because they are sovereign. | |
| I think we have a situation in Canada where over the decades, especially since the 60s, which was really when we started to become a far more statist entity, the will of the people has been more or less subjugated. | |
| We used to have an A team, which was parliament, and the B team, which was the courts. | |
| And now that's kind of flipped. | |
| The A-team is the courts, in my opinion. | |
| Not always, of course, but in way too many serious situations. | |
| The A-team is the courts who are elected by nobody, represent nobody, who nevertheless feel that it's their job to correct our democracy because we poor souls don't know really what we're doing, etc., etc., and so they're going to fix it up for us. | |
| You know, that sort of attitude is... | |
| And it's a move away from... So I guess the general point I'm trying to make is I think that the will of the people in Canada has been subjugated to the courts and to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. | |
| This should be no surprise, and as my book points out, Pierre Trudeau, who was really the chief engineer of the charter, basically disliked what he called checkerboard federalism in the British style. | |
| He did not count as important, like not for a minute, the British tradition out of which Canada was conceived, in which checkerboard federalism was precisely the point. | |
| You want Specific prescribed duties for the provinces and a different list of duties and obligations for the central government. | |
| And they shouldn't be interfering in each other's worlds. | |
| This was going to result in a checkerboard federalism, which is what we had before he came along. | |
| He wanted to end that, so the charter became the kind of instrument, a kind of code law, which enabled him to do it. | |
| Unfortunately, at the same time, it It empowered judges to make important moral, political, and economic decisions for this country, many of which have gone against the grain of the will of the people. | |
| So I say, even though direct democracy is not always a great solution, I mean, it can be harmful if you don't handle it, right? | |
| I think we need some instruments of direct democracy. | |
| For example, we need, I think, recall. | |
| Many American states have recall. | |
| It's been used over 5,000 times down there in the last 150 years. | |
| Is that right? Yeah. It's even been used in Canada, and British Columbia has a form of recall, which has not been used very often, but it's sitting there. | |
| Now, a humorous irony here is that Canada actually brought in recall for the first time in Alberta in 1936. | |
| Premier Eberhardt brought it in, thought it would be great that the peoples should be able to express their will, and recall Politicians if they wanted to. | |
| However, when he found out that he was the first one they were going to use it on, he got rid of the law. | |
| So that was very interesting. | |
| And anyway, I think recall would be a good provision. | |
| The Swiss have it, many American jurisdictions, Australian and some Canadian have it, but we need to talk about it seriously for politicians who misbehave. | |
| Should be able to fire them in the middle of their term. | |
| Secondly, I think we need initiatives. | |
| Initiatives are a device which is used all the time in Switzerland, where the people basically make a law if they can't get their representatives to make a law. | |
| They just make it themselves, you know, X number of signatures, X amount of time, and the thing becomes law and it must be accepted and passed by their political system. | |
| The same with referendums. | |
| Any important, especially constitutional laws in Switzerland, which are created by their, let's call it their parliament, Must go to referendum. | |
| Sometimes they ask for a special majority, but usually it's just a simple majority. | |
| Sometimes a double majority, where a majority of the people and a majority of the cantons, of which there are more than 20. | |
| 24, I think, now. | |
| Anyway, there must be a double majority in many cases. | |
| But what they're basically saying with something like that is, look, Right. | |
| Right. Right. Right. Especially in the case of the Charter, we left out Quebec entirely. | |
| There was 7 million people entirely left out of the process. | |
| I think that was a skulldugger's move. | |
| And we also left out over a million Native people who never got to comment or speak on the situation. | |
| And of course the people themselves, it was never put to them by way of any sort of referendum or vote. | |
| That was close to a third of the population at the time. | |
| Yeah, that's right. That's a lot of people. | |
| So in a sense, These scholars are right when they say we don't really have a constitution. | |
| I mean, in that sense of the word. Of course we do. | |
| We do in the sense that it's legal, but not in the sense that we've gone by the spirit. | |
| We've missed the spirit of it. | |
| So you said that they can propose legislation in Switzerland with this majority or double majority. | |
| Can they strike down legislation as well? | |
| Yeah, I think, yes. | |
| Well, they can basically bring in a new law, which strikes down the old law. | |
| And they're very proud of that. | |
| And again, I'm not saying that the will of the people is always right, but what I like about the will of the people is if they're wrong, they can change it. | |
| Right. Through their own will. | |
| It doesn't become something that's entrenched forever, like in a charter, for example. | |
| Well, and it's very cost-effective, because if you want to try and change a law through some sort of court action, it's very, very expensive and very, very time-consuming, whereas this is just a referendum and a vote, so it's much easier for people to get involved. | |
| Right. Now, here's another thing I like. | |
| People talk to me about the debt. | |
| I feel that Canada's debt situation is terrible. | |
| I don't think we're ever going to get out of it. | |
| I can't see how. We don't have a single political party that's willing to stand up and say to the people, look, this is a disaster. | |
| Any self-conscious people should be able to create, say, a 30-year plan to get rid of the deficit. | |
| Let's just pay off X amount every year until this thing is gone. | |
| Because we are asking future generations to pay for current consumption. | |
| They're not here to defend themselves against our appetites. | |
| So one thing I'd like to see by way of people control would be something, I call it a fiscal guillotine. | |
| It would work like this. Any government which goes to the people with a budget and then runs a deficit two years in a row must go to election. | |
| In other words, it's automatically triggered. | |
| The Auditor General's report comes out, hey, second year deficit, boys, you're going to election. | |
| So the people have an option to throw them out midterm if they want to for not doing what they said they were going to do. | |
| Another one I really like, which is probably totally impractical, a fellow suggested it to me last week from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. | |
| He said, well, I'd love to see, he says, if they run a 6% deficit, I'd like to see a law that says, all members of Parliament must take a 6% cut in pay, and so on. | |
| Like, make it hurt personally. | |
| The other thing I'd like to see, and we're just discussing solutions now, is I think we need to discipline our courts. | |
| I do believe that in a system like ours, the legislative will should be supreme, not the will of judges who are unelected and can't be fired. | |
| So I think we need to create a legislative veto. | |
| That might be two-thirds of the House plus two-thirds of the Senate. | |
| So the court basically makes a law, which they shouldn't be doing anyway, or they strike down a law, which we simply don't agree with as people. | |
| We say, well, you can have your opinion as you wish as a judge, but we disagree with you. | |
| So we should have a legislative veto on court judgments. | |
| I think. And I also believe that we should screen our judges for original intent. | |
| This idea that the Constitution is a living tree that can be shaped by unelected people to correct our democracy when we didn't ask them to do that in the first place is bizarre. | |
| Because as far as I can see, theoretically speaking, if you're going to base the system in your country, the political system, on the will of the people and the sovereignty of the people's will, Then how can you put up with a system in which that's overridden by people who have nothing to do with the people? | |
| So my view would be, when the people make a law, they had an intent. | |
| We know what their intent was. | |
| We can find it through scholarship and through discussion of their basic motives. | |
| What their intent was. | |
| And so I think we should screen judges and say, you have to take a vow, basically, to abide by the will of the people when they made the laws. | |
| And if you don't think it's constitutional, then you can advise the people that it's not constitutional. | |
| And they can make a new law. But you can't make a new law. | |
| Right. I don't even think judges should be able to strike laws down. | |
| I think they should be able to, like, vacate them. | |
| They should be able to say, it's an unconstitutional law, and they're simply advising the people, advising Parliament. | |
| And then Parliament can reconvene and say, we agree with the judges, so we're going to make a new law. | |
| Or we don't agree with them. But then it keeps us in the upper... | |
| Yeah, it's the direct line to the people because of the elected aspect of politicians and the shorter terms rather than the permanent non-elected status of judges. | |
| Yeah. Now here's some other things in this vein I suppose we could think about, which is what about a constitutional limit on spending? | |
| There are many jurisdictions in the U.S., especially at the state level, well, only at the state level, and many other countries, where they have constitutional limits on spending. | |
| They simply say you cannot spend more than X amount of GDP on government, whatever, whatever, whatever, you know, and so this becomes a kind of limitation of the people on On their governors. | |
| That I think you'd also have to put the net around future unfunded liabilities. | |
| Because what happens is, so in California, for instance, they put caps on spending. | |
| And so they couldn't give as many raises to the public sector unions. | |
| So what they did was they said, okay, well, your retirement benefits are going to be so much bigger and better. | |
| And that's how they kept their allegiance. | |
| But there was no money set aside for those. | |
| And that's why California is one thing that's hitting at the moment is all of these unfunded liabilities. | |
| Wisconsin as well. And so I think if you get a cut spending, it has to also include the future liabilities. | |
| That would make sense. | |
| Like extend it into future programs. | |
| These are complicated issues. | |
| There's no simple solution. | |
| But we are bright enough people that we could get around the table and try to figure out how to Prevent this out-of-control situation, which I see not only in Canada, but in many Western democracies. | |
| I think it's almost... I haven't found one that isn't facing this problem of entitlement spending, unfunded liabilities, and the great die-off. | |
| Well, there are two which I could mention, which you might say are doing pretty well, and it's a surprise, actually. | |
| One of them is Switzerland. Switzerland is a country in which you have unbelievably good universities, great roads, great medical system, great education system, etc., etc. | |
| How do they do it? Was that the low tax rate? | |
| They have the lowest tax rate in the European Union. | |
| In every aspect, the lowest ratio of people to bureaucrats in government, I think they have at the federal level, you know, they have one bureaucrat for every 80 citizens, whereas we have one for every 200, sorry, they have one for every 250, we have one for every 80 or less, you know, I got it backwards. | |
| But I mean... They have four languages to deal with, right? | |
| Yeah, right. So in many respects, they're doing very, very well and produce top quality services for the public. | |
| The other country which does the very same thing is Sweden. | |
| Entirely different. Highest tax rate in the European Union, in every way, most government intrusion, most control over the freedoms of the people, and yet they have good roads, good schools, good universities, all that kind of stuff. | |
| So, it's an interesting case study and different ways of producing the very same quality of goods. | |
| So, what I say of course is, okay, if Switzerland is producing this quality of goods for this much money, how come it's costing Sweden and Canada this much? | |
| Where is that money going? | |
| Well, even if it was the same, you'd say, we're spending 30% more to produce the very same good. | |
| How do they do it? Maybe we should look. | |
| Right. See? And ask ourselves how they achieved that. | |
| I think I know how. | |
| Staying out of world wars. | |
| Yeah. That would be one thing. | |
| Well, that's a big one. Yeah. | |
| That's a big one. Although Canada, you know, I mean, it's a long time ago, the Second World War. | |
| Yeah. So constitutional limits on the size of government and on spending. | |
| For example, the Swiss have seven federal ministries. | |
| Hmm. Okay, maybe we need eight because we've got so many coasts. | |
| Sweden has no coasts. | |
| But I mean, they have seven basic ministries. | |
| The last time I looked, we had something like 38 or 39, plus sub-ministries and secretariats and all the rest of it. | |
| I mean, you just go on the web and look for, I mean, you're talking 450,000 federal employees alone. | |
| The last time I spoke to the StatsCan people about this, they said to me, and I think about this, they said, Canada has one full-time Government employee, they're talking about all the levels now, for every five citizens. | |
| I'm saying, okay, but babies are citizens. | |
| Old people are citizens. People who are not working are citizens. | |
| What if you did it by taxpayers? | |
| Instead, that's the proper division. | |
| I think you'd end up, I haven't done it, but you'd end up somewhere around, and I think I'm close, you'd end up about one full-time government employee for every three taxpayers. | |
| Well, I don't think every three Canadians needs a full-time employee to order their lives for them. | |
| Well, but you'd also have to subtract the government workers from that equation because they're on the one side, so it might even be two and a half or something like that. | |
| But the ratio is terrible, and we need to find a way to limit it. | |
| The Swiss have done that. I mean, you can't just grow government. | |
| You can't just create a new department of government in Switzerland. | |
| You can here. Why? | |
| Why should we allow it, you know? | |
| Okay, here's some other things. I think Canada... | |
| Canada, unfortunately, has a lot of language police running around. | |
| And I think we should demand language freedom in this country. | |
| We made a big mistake in the 60s because we based our language regime on... | |
| Well, we had a choice between what is called the personality principle and the territorial principle. | |
| We went with the personality principle. | |
| We said if Stéphane Molyneux, a good French name, he's a Canadian, so he should have rights, bilingual rights in French. | |
| Even 500 miles inside the forest in BC, you know, right? | |
| Whereas the Swiss were smarter. | |
| They had four languages to deal with. | |
| They weren't going to do that. They said it's going to be territorial. | |
| This canton can declare itself to be French-speaking and German-speaking if they want or, you know, Mickey Mouse speaking. | |
| It doesn't matter. This canton may do some other language. | |
| So if you don't like the language in this canton, you can move to the other one. | |
| And so on. But the cantons, or provinces, get to declare their own language, their own official languages, rather than using this personality principle, which we have done. | |
| I think it's been a mistake. It's led to a whole regime of language police. | |
| It's led to, I think, the estimates in this book, The Trouble with Canada Still, which are drawn from good sources, tell us you're talking about 1.5 to 1.8 billion a year. | |
| here, spent on policing language in this country. | |
| And the English-speaking people and others in the province of Quebec, I feel, are really hard done by on this score. | |
| And it's not like the rest of us have been defending them. | |
| We squeal a bit when they bring their bills in to control language. | |
| But we haven't really been rescuing our brothers and sisters from this oppressive language regime in Quebec. | |
| And I think that's too bad. | |
| Well, I think there is a fundamental contradiction between law and culture. | |
| Culture is something that needs to survive in a Darwinian sense and not be protected by law. | |
| Once you start surrounding culture with law, in my opinion, you begin the great die-off of culture. | |
| That's right. I agree with you. | |
| I agree with you. Civil society sort of situation. | |
| In modern physics and other fields of thought, they talk about emerging properties. | |
| Emerging properties of these systems, and civil society is one of them. | |
| I'm a conservative from that point of view, in the Burkean sense, philosophically speaking, not necessarily politically speaking. | |
| And I do feel that that layer of Human existence that we call civil society, which is really the sum of all our voluntary associations, is to me even more important than the bottom layer, which is the individual and individual freedom, which I do feel is terribly important also and has been terribly important in our tradition, but I don't think it should trump the rights of civil society and the obligations and duties especially of civil society. | |
| Which I think it tends to do, especially in libertarian thought, which I'm often a little bit critical of. | |
| Just for that reason, I think that libertarian philosophy, and that's how I got my start. | |
| I mean, I have a lot of time for the great libertarian text, you know? | |
| I do. But I think to a certain extent, if looked at in a narrow way, it has helped to feed us into the hands of the state. | |
| Because it has basically said, individual rights are everything. | |
| Our everything. And civil society and whatever it means, that's just the choice you make. | |
| It's the way you decide to live. | |
| So what? Whereas the Burkean conservative like me, at least in social matters and moral matters, I think that way. | |
| In economic matters, I'm far more a free market, libertarian oriented. | |
| But in social and moral matters, I'm more of a Burkean conservative where I would say, There is no such thing as a free agent or a free and healthy individual outside of the kind of society which makes it possible to become so. | |
| If you don't have that kind of society, and that's what needs to be nurtured, I think, very energetically, and we haven't been nurturing it in this society. | |
| Everything has been moving towards autonomism, in my view. | |
| I'm about to write an essay on that for the New York magazine, The New Criterion. | |
| Are you familiar with it? It's a terrific magazine. | |
| I wish we had one like that in Canada. | |
| And the basic theme of it is, well, I guess my wife says I shouldn't use this title for the article. | |
| But the article will be called Getting Used to the F Word. | |
| And the F word is fascism with a small f. | |
| Now, that's a crazy word to use until you tell people what you mean by it because most people don't know. | |
| A simple way of describing it for me and not counting all the other possible meanings of it would be fascism is about the victory of the will over nature. | |
| The human will over nature. | |
| So that you get into a situation where, you know, say an abortion, you know, it becomes the will of the mother. | |
| Not the mother and the father, but just the mother. | |
| You know, who can decide whether or not this human life survives or doesn't survive. | |
| She can throw it away even at eight pounds, totally healthy, the moment before natural birth, throw it in the garbage in this country without penalty. | |
| If that isn't the hegemony, as they say, of the will, I don't know what is. | |
| The same is true in all matters of the body in Canada. | |
| You know, pornography, if you want it, go buy it. | |
| It's everywhere, there are no restrictions of any kind. | |
| When I was a young man, it would have been just unthinkable. | |
| So, this society has changed in many ways in these respects. | |
| Where the will is everything. | |
| Even that it has climbed up into the highest reaches of our courts. | |
| For example, in the LaVey case, where there was a swingers club in Quebec. | |
| You probably know about this one. | |
| Just to clarify. | |
| Maybe you don't know. I don't know either. | |
| About, not in the... | |
| But in the LeBay case, they started the Swingers Club in a community like this. | |
| Okay, down the street, there's a whatever, Max Milk store. | |
| And over the Max Milk store, I'm just guessing, there's this... | |
| Some sort of sweaty flesh pit of... | |
| Sweaty flesh pit, yeah. | |
| And so... The neighbors got together and said, we don't want a swingers club in our community. | |
| We think it's not very nice for our little boys and girls to walk down the street and see all these people plastered with makeup and paying each other for sex above the Max Milk store. | |
| Everybody knows what it is. Nobody's being fooled. | |
| It's a bad example for our children. | |
| So it went to court, and it went back and forth, but finally the Supreme Court of Quebec basically ruled in the LeBay case, it's called the LeBay case, or now it's known as the Swingers case, they basically ruled that it was okay, because it wasn't harming anybody. | |
| So, you know, the guy won because four of the Five, I guess, of the nine justices in the Quebec Superior Court basically took the position of John Stuart Mill, which is that as long as you're not harming anybody, as long as me going to the swingers club can't prove that it's harming Stephan, Then that's fine. | |
| But the other justices refused that and said, no, no. | |
| Canada has had a community standard of what is morally decent for centuries. | |
| For centuries. And we can't simply slash and burn and drop it because we can't prove that a single individual has been harmed. | |
| Because harm may be direct or indirect. | |
| And we all know what direct harm is. | |
| You know, I punch you, it's direct harm, right? | |
| But I may do things in my life which harm you long term, which we can't even calculate now, you know? | |
| And this must be taken into consideration in the viability of any community. | |
| That's not that easy, you know? | |
| So, again, we had the hegemony or the victory of the will. | |
| Over nature. Because the community was basically saying it's against human nature. | |
| It's against all human decency to have this kind of club up here. | |
| And the judges who went for it instead said, oh yeah, but it's just about whether or not we harm somebody. | |
| The will of the person, you know, starting the swingers club. | |
| So I'm going on about it, which I didn't mean to, but... | |
| That article, I think, is going to be fun to write because I think, in many respects, Canada has been coming apart at the seams because of this emphasis on, let's call it, hyper-individualism. | |
| But only in a particular sphere, usually in the realm of sexual or personal matters. | |
| Yes. But, of course, it's been going quite the opposite way in economic matters. | |
| And that, I think, is a bad... | |
| And this is, right, Pierre Trudeau. | |
| The government has no business in the bedrooms of the nation, but the boardrooms and the businesses and everywhere else... | |
| Regulations, oh, yeah. Well, this leads me again. | |
| I don't know if I mentioned this on my last show with you, which I enjoyed, by the way. | |
| But I should say again, when people say, how did it happen? | |
| I'd say, well, just like you pointed out, people look at Trudeau and they say, well, the guy was a socialist. | |
| And then someone else said, no, no, I was a libertarian. | |
| Well, and by the way, he had a Scottish mother and a French father. | |
| And I argue in the first chapter of my book that really what happened here was, we're talking about the revenge of Montcalm. | |
| We're talking about somebody bringing in a code system of law and imposing it on a British common law based nation and succeeding in doing so. | |
| In every respect, but why did Canadians so easily accept this regime, what you were just saying, this economic and political regulation, the statism? | |
| And I say sex. | |
| It was about sex. | |
| Because what we are today, and Trudeau was so smart, and all the masters of the modern democratic state are really smart because they realize if you can give the people everything they want in terms of their bodily satisfaction, You know, give them their abortion on demand, give them their pornography in every street corner, give them their gay rights, give them their transgender rights, give them their unilateral divorce, where marriage no longer exists, which it doesn't in this country anymore. | |
| You can get married, okay, you both sign, but either one can break it. | |
| And if that's the case, then it's no longer a contract. | |
| Yeah. You can't have a unilateral contract. | |
| You can. You know? So, the long and short of it is, what the masters of our destiny, so to speak, have said is, if we give them the sex and all the rights of the body, they won't notice the other stuff. | |
| Right. We can regulate the hell out of them coast to coast in everything that the public can provide. | |
| But when it comes to their bodies, they will think they are completely more free than they've ever been in their lives. | |
| Yeah, their personal pleasures. | |
| I mean, it's often struck me that... | |
| When it comes to divorce, I mean divorce has such horrendous impacts upon children in particular and it has horrendous impacts upon family income and learning disabilities and behavioral issues and all of that. | |
| And given that parents aren't allowed to generally do things that are bad for the kids on a whim, and I'm not saying people get divorced on a whim, but this sort of unilateral thing. | |
| I can remember if you ever saw the film Kramer vs. | |
| Kramer. Oh yeah. I mean, she left, I know it was a movie, but I thought it was interesting because it was very popular at the time. | |
| What it said to me when I watched it was that this woman can leave the marriage not because the man is abusive, which of course I can understand, right? | |
| Not because he's drunk. | |
| Not because he's unemployed, not because he's whatever, right? | |
| It's not bad. Yeah, he's just, he doesn't fulfill her in a great way, so to speak. | |
| She's emotionally unsatisfied. | |
| Right. And that is okay to then break up the marriage, even though that's going to result in direct harm to the children, direct measurable harm to the children. | |
| I'm certainly not saying people shouldn't be allowed to get divorced, but the barriers to exit are incredibly low, and that has to do with personal satisfaction, regardless of the consequences. | |
| Yeah, well, there's the autonomism again. It's all about me, you know? | |
| Right. And it's all about, yeah, your personal satisfaction, whereas, yeah, they'll give you lots of room in that, perhaps too much room, you might say, but when it comes to the economic side of things, it's... | |
| Yeah, well, let's look at that from the point of view of Sweden. | |
| Sweden is probably the most autonomistic state, also a very pro-family state, by the way, but pro-family on its own terms. | |
| The Swedes are pro-family in the sense that they try to make the Swedish world wonderful for the family via government. | |
| So it's government daycare, it's government schools, it's government housing for young married, it's government facilities for seniors, all the way through. | |
| You know, the whole thing is government, see? | |
| And it's very nice. Swedes love it. | |
| It's like a golden sky. It's like my animals when I open the door, you know, they want to go back in to the pen, even though the door is open. | |
| So Swedes are quite like that. | |
| And maybe that works in a homogeneous society like Sweden where, I don't know, where they had a history of this kind of thing, culturally speaking. | |
| But what did the Swedes do? | |
| The most important thing the Swedes did, and this was just after the Second World War, when Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, who were both Nobel Prize winners, I think, certainly he was, in economics, they started basically engineering the change, changing Sweden from a very traditionalist type of society, like Canada used to be, to a very progressivist, socialist type of nation. | |
| And when they were interviewed on this, years after it was all in place, someone said, what's the most important thing you did to bring this about? | |
| They said, getting rid of the split taxation. | |
| We used to be able to split incomes before taxations in the Swedish home. | |
| But we basically came up with the philosophy that every Swede, male or female, should pay their own way in this world. | |
| We got rid of splitting income before taxation. | |
| Everyone must earn, which meant everyone must go out to work. | |
| Of course, wonderful for the socialist state because they get more tax dollars out of it. | |
| But they said that was the most important thing they did. | |
| Not so good for the kids. To break up the family. | |
| No. In fact, one of the examples I use in the book is from a fellow named Rosen who studied the Swedish society recently, and I quote him in this book in the chapter on radical feminism. | |
| And it's quite shocking. | |
| He says that there are hundreds of thousands of young Swedish girls who are working in Swedish daycare centers, government daycare centers, looking after the children of the women who are looking after the workers' own parents. | |
| Oh, right. In other words, they have people, government-paid physiotherapists and all the rest of looking after these aging senior citizens, right? | |
| But they have young children, so... | |
| But they've moved them out of reciprocal familial relationships, which are non-taxable and non-economic. | |
| That's right. Oh, no question to me that... | |
| I'm not saying it's some sort of conscious Dr. | |
| Hook kind of plan, but the idea of... | |
| Minimizing untaxable labor and moving it into the taxable realm has been a key focus of so many government programs over the past 30 or 40 years. | |
| Well, that's what happened there, and Rosen calls it churning. | |
| Good economists who study the socialist system, they call it churning, economic churning behavior, because the money is just turning over, but nothing productive is being done with it. | |
| And the government has taken its cut off the top in both directions. | |
| And I would argue very strongly that the moment a relationship moves into the taxable realm, it loses so much of the emotional benefit that really is at the foundation of it. | |
| I mean, having some daycare person who's taxed raise your children versus yourself is, I think, quite tragic. | |
| And having some stranger, nurse, physiotherapist look after your aging parents is quite tragic. | |
| Yeah, well, that's right. | |
| Now, there's no question that some of these people are wonderful and devoted and they actually get very attached to the people they're looking after. | |
| But on the whole, in general, you're talking about people who are seeing their, the caretakers who are seeing their charges as a means to an end. | |
| It means to the salary, it means to sending money back home to the Philippines or whatever it is they do with their money. | |
| And I think most telling of all in the daycare situation, I just gave you a copy of War Against the Family. | |
| There was an expert excerpt from that in this book on the daycare situation. | |
| Oh yeah, you may have to read that in my show because I found that such an eye-opener. | |
| But I think if you really study what happens in daycare centers, it goes something like this. | |
| Daycare centers set themselves up as egalitarian institutions. | |
| There's 25 kids in this daycare center. | |
| So when the first, you know, little Susie comes for the job the first day, she's well qualified, government trained, and all that, you know, and so the supervisor says, well, Susie, we want to talk to you about how you're going to treat all the children in this daycare center. | |
| Oh, she says, how's that? | |
| And the supervisor says, well, equally. | |
| We want you to treat them all equally, all the same. | |
| That's the last thing in the world that a natural parent does with their own child. | |
| You see? Children are so different. | |
| Well, not just different, they're very special. | |
| No child is like my child. | |
| No child is like your child. | |
| You're not going to believe that. Oh, sure, they all share something in common. | |
| They're all human beings. But you will treat your child with unusual love. | |
| You know, unusual love. | |
| That won't happen at daycare center. | |
| And so no matter how good the care is, it's egalitarian in nature. | |
| It's not like The extraordinary, it's called extraordinary love of a parent. | |
| Now, when children get a lot of extraordinary love, they begin to feel very confident in the world around them, that they can navigate it for the rest of their lives, especially if it happens during those crucial years, psychologically speaking. | |
| There's many periods there where child development experts will tell you, sometimes there's a window of five or six months, depending on what development's going on, where you must have that. | |
| And if you don't, the child, especially if there's too much Egalitarian daycare, no matter how good. | |
| Maybe clean, maybe great, maybe very egalitarian, but it cannot supply that special sense that the child must have that he's number one in the world, he or she is number one in the world. | |
| If they don't get that in those years, they will never feel that they're number one in the world and have that sort of inherent value that comes from the natural parents or, okay, grandmother, whatever, family people who treat them differently. | |
| Non-egalitarian. Yeah, early love is a fuel that lasts a whole lifetime. | |
| I think so too. And you have it or you don't, and if you don't, you're propping yourself up a little bit for the rest of time. | |
| And I think also the point that you made about daycare in the book about how if the child gets attached to a care worker, the churn, the turnover for those people can be quite high. | |
| It's very large. And so it's almost like the kids wouldn't want to get attached because you might not be here in three months or six months. | |
| It breaks your little heart. | |
| Yeah. You know and so how much heartbreaking can you get? | |
| So after a certain amount of it you try not to attach. | |
| You become cool and cold and you you don't want that risk anymore. | |
| Well what happens is the more permanent relationships become your peer relationships rather than your quote authority relationships and Peer pressure, peer influence is a huge problem for a lot of kids and teenagers who are looking more towards their peers for social rules, for what is acceptable or what is positive or what is negative, rather than, we hope, some older and wiser citizens who have been around the block a little bit. | |
| Well, now that brings me back to politics, one of the things I really like that the Harper government did in Canada was they decided to give the breaks and the money, whatever, to the parents. | |
| Of course, that made them very unpopular with the left. | |
| And I say, good. Well, it should. | |
| It brings me back to... Let me just ask one question to the students I'm reading before you came over. | |
| There seems to be some pretty good information that the discrepancy between the budgets being proposed by the three different parties is in the order of one to two to three percentage points. | |
| That to me is, I mean, not a significant... | |
| Well, you mean between them? Yeah, between them. | |
| Not much difference. In terms, I mean, certain focuses that they can spend on it, they have some difference. | |
| But the budget as a whole doesn't seem to have much difference. | |
| It's not like you go to the Conservatives, they're going to be spending 25% less. | |
| So you go to the NDP, they're spending 25% more. | |
| It's all very narrow in terms of the total spending, which, since we were talking about the deficit, has a significant impact. | |
| Do you think that there are significant differences or significant enough differences between the parties and their proposals and what they will actually follow through on, which is, of course, a bit of a crapshoot, to make the election important? | |
| Well, I think it's discouraging to see the structural reality at work here, which is that in a three-party state, which is basically what we have, everyone tries to cover off the middle. | |
| They're all vying for that middle ground. | |
| That's why their budgets are so close. | |
| In a two-party state, like in America, you see the opposite. | |
| You see they're trying to be as different from each other as possible. | |
| So you get Democrats and Republicans having huge scraps over the budgets, and that's a two-party system. | |
| In a three-party system, you're going to get this hug in the middle, which is what we have. | |
| It really suggested if we had a two-party system, we'd be better off, because at least we'd have a real choice. | |
| Somebody would come out and say, you know, we're proposing cutting these budgets 5% every year for the next whatever years until we get the debt paid off. | |
| We don't hear that ever, and we're not going to hear it. | |
| You know, so that's why I say we have a structural debt, and We'll be carrying it forward for a long time to come. | |
| And you mentioned earlier, before this show started, what's that going to mean when what I happen to call the great die-off comes? | |
| I mean, the great die-off, I'm going to be part of it. | |
| I'm 70 now. You're all part of it at one point or another. | |
| Yeah, but I mean, my generation, it's kind of starting there, post-war babies. | |
| I was born in 1940, during the war. | |
| You know, so when this cohort, I guess they call it, of Canadians drops, they're going to drop fast over a 20, 25 year period. | |
| Boom, boom, boom, boom. And then people say, oh, that's why they have immigration. | |
| That's why we need some more immigration. | |
| And I said, I don't think so, especially immigration, which is not in sync with the deep culture and history of Canada and Canada's historical values. | |
| If you're bringing in people and telling them that it's important for them to keep the culture of their country of origin alive here while they're here and that it's just as important as Canada's Historical culture, what I call the deep culture of the country, as opposed to the skin-deep culture. | |
| You've got problems brewing, and especially because economists, left, right, and center, are united on this one point. | |
| George Borjas, or Borjas, I guess he pronounced it, the Spanish name, I think, of Harvard, put it past. | |
| He said, the only discernible Effect of immigration on the economy of any nation in the Western world is the depression of the wages of native workers. | |
| In other words, they're offering their services for less. | |
| So it keeps wages down. | |
| And not only that, but the wages of immigrants themselves. | |
| I'm not talking about all the wonderful immigrants who brought us entrepreneurial ideas and great work ethic, which we could stand to learn from, many of them, ourselves. | |
| I'm talking about the masses of immigrants, looking at them as a whole, because most of them are not that kind of immigrants. | |
| They're family class people. I met a fellow yesterday, he said he brought 22 people to Canada after he became an immigrant, all family and relatives. | |
| Just here, you know? We know anything about them. | |
| A lot of them have not done well from a financial point of view. | |
| And so our own government tells us, it's in the book again, that the wages of immigrants have tended to decline over the last couple of decades and continue to deteriorate, quote-unquote. | |
| So you can't say that you're going to replace the great die-off problem with immigration. | |
| It's not a great answer, which is going to lead us to I think a dramatic turnaround if we actually, you know, grab the bull by the horns, so to speak. | |
| We're going to have to come up with changes in family policy of a tax nature, And policy nature, which do the job. | |
| You're talking about, for example, how many kids would people have? | |
| I mean, now we're talking 1.5, 1.6 children per woman. | |
| Canada's doomed if that keeps up because we simply cannot recover. | |
| We can't make enough babies at that rate to ever do the job and we would just kind of go down. | |
| As I say, immigration is not the answer either because it's so socially dislocating and economically it has not been proven to be a boon. | |
| So we're going to carry that forward unless we make a change. | |
| Now, what would some of those changes be? | |
| Well, I've said this before, and people say, oh, you're an extremist. | |
| And I say, well, they called me that when I predicted we would have gay marriage one day. | |
| But here it is. | |
| So am I, or am I just seeing farther into the future than some other people? | |
| I think if panic hits the land overpopulation, it will be late in the day, it's already very late, and it will be like an avalanche. | |
| And it's too late to do anything about it, because by the time you've run out of taxpayers, it takes another 18 years to grow them, so what are you going to do, right? | |
| It does. Well, late in the day, you try a rearguard action, and I think it's not impossible, it sounds really impossible from this vantage point, But it's not impossible to imagine a time when Canada's governments, Canada's business owners who are watching their stores empty because they don't have enough tenants, you know, the lights aren't going on in the top 10 floors of that building anymore, that kind of thing. | |
| Governments want to stay elected, so they will be making laws which will seem very dramatic now, but will seem normal then, such as all kinds of family-friendly tax policies. | |
| There will even be, I predict, there will even be anti-homosexual regulation. | |
| It will come back just like it used to be because they will say, well, you can do all that privately if you want, but we're not going to sanction it or give you benefits to promote it. | |
| That's your business privately, but we are full-on heterosexual government now. | |
| We want, for example, mortgage interest deductibility for all families until the last child was 18. | |
| Big deal that, you know? We want special baby bonuses like the Quebecers have done and the French have done to encourage fertility. | |
| There's about 25 items at the end of the feminism chapter. | |
| I ask the reader to try to imagine a pro-family state. | |
| What sort of policies and tax changes? | |
| Well, that stuff may be effective in the long run, but it's not going to solve the problem in any particular government's election cycle. | |
| Maybe you produced another 50,000 two-year-olds, but that doesn't help you with your tax issues. | |
| Well, for example, if you brought out a law against abortion, The life of the mother, you would have 110,000, at least 100,000 lives on the deck every year. | |
| Every year, 100,000. | |
| The highest peak of abortion in Canada was 110,000. | |
| It's now down around 90,000. | |
| But if you average the whole thing since 1980-some-odd, when the Morgenthaler case came along. | |
| Another case, by the way, where the courts struck down Canada's law on abortion against the will of the people. | |
| You cannot produce a single poll in Canada. | |
| There simply isn't one. A fair poll in which you ask the people this question, are you in favor of abortion on demand at any time from conception till the moment prior to natural birth? | |
| They will say, no way. Many might be in favor of it in the first three weeks or two months or first trimester. | |
| But no, there's no majority. | |
| And yet we have this. Yeah. | |
| But the only other solutions that would have... | |
| There's a hundred thousand kids every year for doing nothing except changing the law. | |
| Well, I mean, assuming that that doesn't change because abortion is no longer available, that people would be more careful about contraception. | |
| So anyway, that's a possibility. The other two things that would occur, of course, is to try and get, you know, you let people buy their way into Canada with money that goes to the government. | |
| That would be another way that you would simply lower that, right? | |
| right so you just basically charge people the bridge toll to get into Canada and that would give them some money the other thing of course that could occur give you some money well so you would then basically send the word around the world 20,000 bucks you can come to Canada I thought we were doing that with But it's pretty high. I think it's a pretty high number. | |
| Yeah, too high. So they would lower that. | |
| And so that would be a way of getting money from people coming in. | |
| Yeah, the problem is still cultural dislocation. | |
| Oh, no, I agree. I'm not saying these are good solutions. | |
| I'm just saying that these are solutions that would occur. | |
| The other thing, of course, that could happen is you would have some merging with a more fertile country like the U.S., right? | |
| That would be another way that you would try and solve that, I think, in the short run, give people more free movement between Canada and the U.S., and maybe even some sort of political merger. | |
| It wouldn't be huge, but that would be some way, because America still has not a huge birth rate, but it certainly is better than most of the West. | |
| Yeah. Yeah, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, somewhere in there. | |
| They're only making sustainability with immigration. | |
| Without immigration, they're still on a decline. | |
| Not as bad. I think Japan is 1.2. | |
| I mean, they're basically just vanishing. | |
| Yeah, that's right. Oh, they say Italy, whatever Princeton Center for Population Studies, they said that Italy, by 2050, will have something like 20 million fewer people than it has to date. | |
| Right. This is really scary. | |
| I'm not advocating for big countries, by the way. | |
| I think that's phony, too. You don't have to be a big country to be a successful country. | |
| Take Switzerland as an example. | |
| Take Sweden as an example. | |
| These are not big countries, but they're very successful. | |
| But you do need a mix, the proper mix between children. | |
| The triangle has to be like that. | |
| Lots of children at the bottom. | |
| Not so many old people at the top. | |
| Canada is now like this. | |
| Soon it'll be inverted. | |
| I can't get my elbow. Soon it'll be an inverted pyramid. | |
| And that's real trouble. | |
| You cannot recover from that, which I think is what you were saying. | |
| Yeah, and people underestimate the degree. | |
| Because we have lots of political philosophies and we have culture, we have tradition, but there is a basic reality to the mathematics of demographics that you simply... | |
| I mean, there's no amount of philosophy that will produce taxpayers where they aren't there. | |
| We can't recover. I don't know if we're there yet, but we could be very soon. | |
| We need this national discussion. | |
| I don't know how long we're going to go on here. | |
| I think fundamentally what needs to happen, and I'm really speaking about my own sort of theories of choices about child raising. | |
| It needs to be more attractive to be a parent. | |
| And fundamentally right now, with taxes so high, with all of this and that, people look at being parents. | |
| And I had these conversations with my friends in my 20s. | |
| I mean, we saw the people who were older and said, okay, so what do you do? | |
| You've got to be up all night with the kids. | |
| They're sick. You've got to take them to hospital. | |
| You've got to do all this and that and the other. | |
| It costs you a fortune to have the kids. And then you've got to go to work for eight hours a day, you've got to commute for two hours a day, and you come home and you're tired, and then you've got to make food for the kids and put them to... | |
| Like, what is the fun in that, as far as parenting goes? | |
| That's right. It's been taken out of it by the state, because the state wants workers, so the state makes it unattractive to stay home from a tax point of view, and in every other way to stay home with your own children. | |
| I'm just opening the book, I'm not going to read them for your viewers, but there's 16 of them here. | |
| How Canadians Should React to the Coming Demographic Winter? | |
| And here I have LMH, which means 282. | |
| I'll just give you a few. | |
| For example, increase dependent child tax credits progressively by the number of children payable until each reaches 18. | |
| These are all tax measures, you know, not all of them. | |
| Introduce a generous and progressively larger one-time maternity cash and tax-free bonus for each child. | |
| And one above. Three, allow mortgage interest deductibility for all legally married heterosexual couples. | |
| I'm not saying we should do this for gay couples or common law couples. | |
| I think you need to be legally married. | |
| You need to make the commitment, take the leap. | |
| Because why? Sociologically we know that the common law couples split up at 50% higher rate than legally married couples. | |
| That is still true today in Canada. | |
| So I'm saying if you're going to have a policy, you have to discriminate in favor of the goals of your policy. | |
| And this is one way that you do it. | |
| So you need to index the incomes of these kinds of couples to counter bracket creep and taxation so they don't go into higher brackets just because of inflation. | |
| You need to allow higher registered retirement savings contributions from these kind of couples as long as they have children, not if they don't have children. | |
| I know that some people can't have children. | |
| Well, okay, but the point of the policy is to encourage those who can to have more children. | |
| I also think you should disallow welfare for the children of the wealthy. | |
| It's a scandal in this country that you can be a son or daughter of a millionaire, fight with your parents, walk out of home with your peanut butter sandwich in your knapsack, go down to the corner and claim Because your parents abused you. | |
| Well, they were probably just disciplining you. | |
| Yeah, if there's no legal case of abuse, then... | |
| Well, that's different. But I think most of this is not the case. | |
| And if the family's wealthy, that kid should not be able to get bucks from the rest of us. | |
| In other words, it would drive them back to the home. | |
| So anyway, the chapter has got lots of those kinds of recommendations in it, which I think would help a lot. | |
| If you want, we can just end. I can give you a snapshot, quick bullets. | |
| Snapshot away. On the policies in the book, by a policy chapter. | |
| For example, the first chapter is about Canada's relativistic definition of poverty. | |
| Everyone wants to help the poor, but you can't help the poor when they're defined in a relative way. | |
| In fact, it's bizarre because it means if the country becomes more wealthy, you actually have more poor. | |
| How can that be? So I say that you've got to end relative poverty and And so that would end a lot if you could do that, bring in a proper definition of property based on basic needs, not on low income cutoffs and all that kind of stuff. | |
| I think we need to end foreign aid. | |
| There's a dynamite chapter on foreign aid here. | |
| I think we need to end all foreign aid to militaristic and despotic nations. | |
| I mean, it's shocking that we spent three quarters of a billion. | |
| Handing out money to about 24 nations, which I study in this book, those same nations turned around and spent $130 billion on bombs and airplanes in the same year. | |
| What are we doing, you know? | |
| And then when it comes to radical feminism, crazy. | |
| This is the first book which actually got the research on how much money we have spent on radical feminist objectives since 1973. | |
| Give us that figure. You know, it's $1.3 to $1.5 billion. | |
| Since 1973. Now, this money was spent on radical feminist causes, which the majority of Canadian women have never supported. | |
| And so we don't know what the organic shape of feminism looks like because it's so artificially propped up by these tax subsidies and direct grants. | |
| That's right. And also, everybody wants equality for women, of course, but we also want equality for men. | |
| And in the first part of this chapter, I take great pleasure in explaining to people that there are lots of situations in Canada where men are not treated equally and never have been. | |
| So let's try to write the balance a bit of who's bitching about who in terms of gender equality, you know, right? | |
| Before the chapter even starts. | |
| And then when it comes to criminal justice, I think we have to get rid of our hug-a-thug mentality for violent crimes in particular. | |
| I'm not for throwing petty criminals in jail. | |
| Let's try to deal with them in the community, blah, blah, blah. | |
| But violent criminals, I have no mercy for these guys. | |
| I mean, when I found out from our own government that 500 criminals released from jail in the last 35 years proceeded to murder 557 innocent Canadians, All of them were pronounced safe for the community. | |
| All of them were pronounced no longer a public threat. | |
| Yeah, right. And none of the bureaucrats face any issues? | |
| No, no, no, no, no, they don't. | |
| I mean, if a psychiatrist says that somebody's safe and that somebody goes and harms someone, the psychiatrist can be liable. | |
| But of course, the parole officers, they have no personal liability. | |
| They're above the law. They're above the law, and I don't think they should be. | |
| Actually, it's an interesting case, if you want to. | |
| It's not exactly humorous, but there's an interesting case, which I cite in the chapter. | |
| On criminal justice, where there's a criminal, I don't know if he ever succeeded, he may be still under the... | |
| being fought out now, but he sued the government for releasing him too soon. | |
| He said, he released me too soon. | |
| And if he hadn't, I wouldn't have done that. | |
| I'm not ready. Yeah, I'm not ready. | |
| And the same with multiculturalism, the chapter on multiculturalism, I think that it was a huge mistake for Canada. | |
| And I'm going to mention my son-in-law, Paul Atiyah, who was born in Canada, of Egyptian parents who emigrated here. | |
| He and I are actually, and a few other people, are starting an organization called Immigrants for Canada. | |
| And the first theme, which runs all through the statement of principles, is Canada first, country of origin second. | |
| Not the way we've been doing it, where they're all the same or equal, you know, scrapping with each other for pieces of the public pie. | |
| I don't know. We say Canada first, country of origin second. | |
| So you'll find out about that in the chapter. | |
| And I already mentioned ending language policy in the chapter called French Fried. | |
| Which I think is a kind of interesting discussion of the role of Quebec in Canadian politics. | |
| And lastly, we talked enough about the bureaucracy or the extent to which the courts are creating laws in Canada instead of applying them. | |
| Not always the case, of course. | |
| They do some good things, but under no circumstances, judges in Canada should be making law, only applying it. | |
| Making the law is the role of the people. | |
| Great, excellent suggestions. | |
| A lot of food for thought, and I wanted to give you the feedback from the last show we did together. | |
| People just said it was scintillating, and I think they felt it was scintillating because they talked so little. | |
| I think that really was... | |
| They were? Because I talked scintillating. | |
| They felt it was scintillating for somebody with similar brains. | |
| Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. | |
| Real pleasure. Thank you so much, Bill. | |
| And I'll put links to the book, The Trouble with Canada Still. | |
| You can. It's available at the moment. | |
| The publisher went bankrupt. Another Canadian problem. | |
| Not because of the book. No. | |
| Unfortunately, they went bankrupt. | |
| It's the second Canadian publisher that's gone bankrupt to me. | |
| And I warned them before. | |
| I said, you guys are in the government up to your arms. | |
| In fact, they went bankrupt because they were declined a $400,000 grant from Ottawa. | |
| So they closed their doors. I'm now looking for a new publisher. | |
| And McClellan Stewart's looking at it at the moment. | |
| So we'll see what comes of that. | |
| And we'll put your website out there. | |
| Fantastic, as always, to chat with you. | |
| And hopefully you'll come back. Yeah, thank you. |