Nuanced. - 145. Candice Malcolm: Crime, Politics and Indian Residential Schools Debate

Episode Date: February 13, 2024

Candace Malcolm, founder of True North Media, discusses independent media, politics, drug decriminalization, and gender representation, advocating for nuanced discourse on Indian Residential Schools and debating the topic with Aaron Pete. Candice Malcolm, an investigative journalist, best-selling author, and nationally syndicated Toronto Sun columnist, is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of True North. With a history of reporting from conflict zones and uncovering significant terrorist networks within Canada, her work has garnered global attention. A Vancouver, BC native, Candice holds two master's degrees and resides in Toronto with her family.Send us a textThe "What's Going On?" PodcastThink casual, relatable discussions like you'd overhear in a barbershop....Listen on: Apple Podcasts   SpotifySupport the shownuancedmedia.ca

Welcome back to another episode of The Bigger Than Me podcast. Here is your host, Aaron. Journalism is all about seeking the truth. I believe it's important to consume a variety of news sources to make sure that you're an informed citizen. I'm speaking with a seasoned journalist, author, and the founder and editor-in-chief of True North Media. My guest today is Candace Melcombe. Candice, it is such a pleasure to sit down with you today. I've been looking forward to having this conversation because I think it's important to understand different perspectives.

Would you mind first just briefly introducing yourself? Yeah, sure, Aaron. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. Thank you for following up because I know you had wanted to have me on before and then things got busy for me. So I appreciate the tenacity of following up. And yeah, I'm Candace Malcolm. I'm a journalist. I am the founder of True North, which is a digital media company.

We do podcasts. We do written news reports focused on Canadian. politics, Canadian culture, and economics. What else? I'm a mother. I have three little kids and actually one on the way. So soon will be a mother of four. I've been married for 10 years. And yeah, I mean, we can get into any, any aspect of my previous career, my life now, and anything you want to talk about, Aaron, I'm totally game. Brilliant. Would you mind taking me back? What made you interested in journalism? It's interesting. I, uh, that's,

That's a good question. I kind of spent the early part of my career on the sort of intersection between journalism and politics. I was interested in politics more from like an ideological or philosophical perspective. I liked reading and trying to understand like the meaning of life and how we order society and why. And, you know, I can't say I was ever really overly partisan. I maybe interacted a little bit with partisan politics here and there. But what I like more was the idea is behind it and why. And I think that that kind of led itself to telling stories, asking questions, wondering why, writing. And yeah, I kind of like stumbled my way into journalism. And, you know, I kind of come from things from an outside perspective, I think, because I was never really like an insider with, I didn't go to journalism school. And I, even partisan politics, I never really fit in with any one particular party.

And so it kind of makes sense that I went my own way and started my own media company because I don't think that I really fit in anywhere else I worked. I've worked at several different media companies, but I think I feel more at home just doing my own thing. And I'm fortunate just because the way that the media landscape is shifting, so much of news and information and media is now distributed independently. Like you don't need to be on the CBC to have a huge audience and talk to a lot of Canadians. you can just start a podcast like you've done and you find your audience that way. So I think I've

been fortunate in many ways. And the thing that I'm doing now is I absolutely love doing it. So I feel very blessed and very grateful to be in this position. What values do you think underlie your approach to journalism that might be somewhat unique from people who've gone the traditional path? Yeah. I mean, obviously, I think that the core, I think, I hope that the core of what any journalist is doing is getting at the truth, trying to ask questions and solve mysteries and try to uncover the truth. That's sort of the North Star, and that's what we're always aiming for and trying to get to. I think for me, yeah, just being an outsider, I question sort of like basic assumptions, like the way that things work, just because that's the way it works,

doesn't mean that that's the right way to do it, or just because that's the convention or the tradition doesn't necessarily mean that that's the way it ought to go. So yeah, I think maybe just being an outsider. Look, I, I didn't really grow up being very political. I wasn't one of those kids that was like hardcore political when I was a teenager. Like I was always kind of more like politically apathetic and came to politics a little later. I went to university without even knowing what I was going to study. And then I didn't become, I became a political science major like halfway through my second year because I took some political science class. and I liked them.

But yeah, politics was sort of new to me and I didn't have like a political background, like a lot of other people that grow up in it. And so just, you know, seeing it from an outside perspective, again, like asking the basic questions. I think that that sort of led me on the path to always be questioning why and not just taking things at face value.

What issues did you see that interested you from a journalistic perspective? Was there standout problems our society was facing, our culture was facing that stood out to you? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, it's funny because things change a lot, but things are also always the same. I remember when I was like a teenager and just even just like seeing the amount of poverty. Like I grew up in Vancouver and so like I would go to, my parents would take me to like a hockey game. I'd go to see a Kinnock game and we drive through like a bad neighborhood on the way leaving the hockey game.

and it was like unbelievable to me that the Lowery side of Vancouver like existed like it was like I looked at it and I just couldn't believe that that that was what that was a state of things in my city like a place where I lived pretty comfortably and almost you know a very sheltered life and then you see that there is like this absolutely horrific thing happening in in your city uh in your backyard right and it's like people are using drugs they're out on the street they're being left to die basically and no one cares i mean that's that's the sort of like naive teenage perspective that i saw it's like why isn't this an emergency like why aren't we fixing this why aren't we taking all of those individual people and like rescuing them basically like getting them

out of that situation and helping them and i mean you you kind of like learn more about it and you're like okay it's not that simple it's not that easy you can't just like take a person and fix them. They obviously have a lot of trauma and a lot of reasons in their life that led them to be in that position. But still, I think that maybe like the first time you become aware of social problems, it is kind of like, to me, there was like an essence of urgency, like we need to fix this. We need to act. And it's kind of sad when I think about it because it's like, you know, 20 years later. And the problem has just gotten way worse. In fact, it's sort of proliferated. And it's everywhere now. It used to be like a very isolated little spot in Vancouver where you would see

tent cities and prostitutes and open drug use and people just kind of turning a blind eye to it and walking by it like it's not happening. And now it's like, oh, that's normal. You see that in every city in Canada and even in small cities. Like you go on Vancouver Island and you know, you're like in Courtney and you see it there. And like that I was never the case before. So in some ways I think that our society is losing these battles, like it's coming apart even more. And I think that there's still so much, Aaron, wrong in Canada that we need to address. And in some ways, maybe we're like too complacent to actually fix these things. So I know your question was about like journalism, the issues that inspired me. But I think that that that kind of explains that like

there's still so many things wrong with our country. And there's problems that we need to address and fix. And if people aren't willing to like talk about it, focus on it, expose it, tell the stories about it, like report on it. That's what we do at True North. You try to report on the stories that it other other organizations are just not covering for whatever reason. Maybe it's because they have a political agenda or their focus is elsewhere or it's too, it's too hard or too uncomfortable or maybe they do cover it. But like on a more superficial level, whereas maybe we want to take a deeper dive and try to figure out like what is happening here. Why? what what what is changed what's leading to this problem and let's like let's like try to figure out a way to

solve it or at least at least mitigate it and try to make the situation better for those people who are who are suffering through that that's actually a follow-up question i'll just ask do you think public policy is the way that we solve some of those very challenging problems that you're describing because for some it can seem like obvious we need to have public policies police what like there's lots of different public policies approaches we can take take, but some say this is on the individual. They need to take the steps and we can't control the individual or force them to do things. Do you think public policy is a tool that we need to use to address some of these issues? Yeah, it's funny because I think when I was younger, my answer

would have been like much more libertarian. I always say like, you know what? Like that's a person's, that's freedom, right? In some ways, I think it's like extreme freedom, freedom taken to such an extreme extent. It's like if you want to waste your life and be on drugs and destroy your body that way, you know, be a prostitute or whatever. Like, That's your choice. And the way that we can fix that would probably, like, like the way, a better path towards solving some of these issues is not through the government because the government is big and clunky and inefficient and impersonal and all the problems with the government.

Like, we should have a much more limited government, which is my general worldview. And that's all true. Like, I think that on a personal level, like, if you imagine someone who was a former drug addict who's turned their life around. and you know they probably have a personal story they probably have a story about a friend that intervened or a family member or they met someone who inspired them and it's it's always a person so it's never like oh i got clean because of the government i mean that that's what i think right but i i think on a more fundamental level erin like the problem is it's government it's the loss right it's a the solution might not be entirely public policy i think a lot of it will have to come from civil society society. But the fact that our laws allow this to happen, that we don't treat this like a criminal offense, that we are as a society okay with drug use and we endorse it, we subsidize it in some ways, we give it away. Like those are all tacit nods saying to individuals that this is,

this is a path, you know, it's not necessarily a good path, but it's a path. Whereas, you know, if you go to countries and you go to places where this is just not tolerated, you. and it's not accepted. It's against the law. Like, you're not going to see fentany use in Singapore, right? You're not going to see people, you know, wasting life while using drugs in a country like Turkey. Like, it's just, they just not allowed. Not allowed. It's banned, right? And so I think that in some ways, our society, we're too lenient and too relaxed and okay with people doing things that are completely detrimental to themselves. So, yes, there needs to be a legal framework to stop it. And then as far as like, how can we improve things, I think that, yes, civil society has to do a lot of the heavy lifting. I'm taking you on a bit of a tangent, but I think this is such an interesting conversation. How do you feel about the comments? Because you could say condone, but I think of people like Dr. Gaber-Matte, who would say that we understand that we're becoming, we're creating a space for these individuals to understand the pain and the trauma and the abuse that they've been through.

and we're starting to understand that this is one of the ways in which they try and cope with this. And we don't have the same small town communities that we used to. Now we have millions of people in these cities and there's just not that human connection. When you do the studies in New York and people will see somebody on the ground struggling, they just keep walking. Somebody else will help them out. That bystander effect takes over that these are some of the problems we're facing. We're becoming a more understanding society. how do you think about those kind of arguments that I'm hearing more and more?

Well, I mean, you can always find justifications, and I have a lot of respect for Gabor Mate. I think that's how he'd say his name. I don't always agree with him. Actually, I usually don't agree with him. But, of course, it's like if you live in a big city, like, look at Canada. It's like, okay, what's your tax rate? I don't know. I pay like 50% of the money that I make to the government.

So when it comes time to, like, what I have afterwards, am I going to be, like, super generous and start donating like tons of money to like my church and like mental health groups or even things that I believe in it's like it's like when you get that much away you're kind of outsourcing the responsibility right or like if you live in a big city exactly like like someone's dying on the street and you're like well I got to go I got to go get my kids like I don't have time to deal with this person and their issues whereas you know if you lived in a small community where it was like kin and family members and people whom you had social bonds and kinship with, you would not just step over them. So part of it is definitely like how we live

and how we've structured our society. And I think a lot of it is when you have such a big overbearing government, like one of my biggest philosophical disagreements with people whom I respect on the political left is that they give like too much respect and acceptance that government will solve these problems. Whereas I think that not only is a government incapable of solving problems because it's inefficient and bloated and the incentives are all wrong. But you actually don't want to live in a society where you outsource that. Like you want to live in a society where you take personal responsibility. You take responsibility for your community. You're connected in your community. You know your neighbors. You're going to make sure that like not only am I

responsible for making sure my kids are okay, but I'm responsible for making sure the kids in my community are okay. So if my neighbors away and I see one of our kids and something's happened, I'm going to go help them because I know them, right? And part of the problem living in like a big modern society is that you don't have those connections. So I don't know if I quite answer your question, but I think that rather than saying like, oh, it's okay, I understand, and I'm compassionate towards someone who turns to drugs to cope with their pain, I think it would be better for everyone if we just said, no, that's not an option. You're not going to numb yourself through drugs and alcohol. That's just not what we do in our society. You know, you can deal with it

through other medical means, like go to therapy and, you know, start exercising and start having a healthy lifestyle and we can like work through these things with your community, with your family, with your friends. But saying like, okay, as a society, like one of the things that we're okay with is just like completely destroying your mind and your body with drugs because you've had a bad childhood. I don't think that that's like a compassionate approach to helping people. Like, like, that's not a good way to live. And, and I can say the same day. I mean, maybe, maybe I'm, like, taking things too much in a tangent here.

But it's the same thing with, like, how we eat in our diet. It's like a lot of the things that we eat, we just shouldn't eat. A lot of the things that kids have access to, they just, they shouldn't eat. You shouldn't eat highly processed food. It's really bad for you. And it will kill you. And it's like, why don't we say these things? Why don't we teach each other these things?

Like, how come these, like, really kind of basic truths about, like, our world that we live we don't we don't really like talk about so i'm i'm not just like singling out drugs that i think are bad um you know the truth that matter is like if you want to go drink and you know numb yourself that way it's a free country go ahead if you want to go do a bunch of drugs i mean fine but i don't think it's a good thing i don't think that we should be saying yeah you know this is just another life choice and and if that's how you cope that's fine and and oh it's legal and oh if you want some fentanyl, here, we'll pay for it. We'll hand it out to addicts on the street. This is not the direction that I think a healthy society heads in. I really appreciate all of that breakdown

in comparing it to food and stuff because government, I would say, is always a process of incentives and disincentives and how we structure that plays a significant role. And a lot of the movement we see is in regards to trying to be more understanding and accepting. And at an individual person to person level, I agree with that sentiment. But as you move up to the provincial and federal government, you can't apply those same rules because it's not going to have the same impact because it's a scaling rule. Like you're now applying something across a country in a different way that it's not the same when I show empathy to another person. And I'm like, hey, you know what? You've fallen down. You've been abused. I understand that. And I'm here to

help you. That's a different thing than the federal government instituting something. that's going to have an impact where they're not saying anything to the person. They're just creating an incentive or a disincentive. And that's a complex issue that we have to grapple with and make sure that we steer the country and look at these incentives and what are we encouraging people to do? And what does this policy say beyond just being understanding and what are the ramifications it's going to have? Because I come from a criminology degree, we talk about these issues. And one of them is that when we did ban alcohol and we had an absolute prohibition, alcohol was some of the most concentrated moonshine was.

one of the most concentrated is a consequence. And so there are arguments that when we ban things outright or when we push society too far, that the extremes come about as well. And that's the argument being made with fentanyl and legalizing some of the lower level drugs is because we don't want people to escalate and get the most extreme things. Have you heard those arguments as well in regards to drug decriminalization? Yeah, it's interesting. And I appreciate you bringing that up because I think that one day future criminologists will study this period, 24 and look at how, hey, when you legalize drugs, like hard drugs like heroin and crack and fentanyl, it doesn't just like become a niche thing that is not that big of a problem.

It's the opposite. It's that it concentrates. It's like if Vancouver and San Francisco are two cities in North America that completely allow all this stuff and sometimes subsidize it, hand it out. City of Toronto does it too now. You're going to get more of it. You're going to get more of it. And there's a reason that there's more of these drug overdoses and there's more crime concentrated in the areas where they're handing out the drugs because people are going to, we're living through a social experiment right now. And I don't think that the results are positive. I don't think that people would say, look at your community if you live in an urban area. Do you think your neighborhood's gotten safer in the last five years? Do you feel safe walking your kids around and going to the

park. I mean, almost everyone I know has stories about their kids, like literally finding needles in parks in our cities. And it's like, that's not really the type of community that I want to live in. That's not the world that I want to live in. And so I totally understand the idea of like prohibition, you know, people are going to find a way to want to drink. It's ingrained in our culture. And, you know, when there was prohibition, there was just a huge black market. And it created a lot of other criminality. And, you know, the reality is that whatever, whatever there is that we have laws surrounding, there's going to be a black market for, like, that's just kind of like human nature, I guess. There's always going to be that, those type of people who are

willing to break the law to try to make more money or whatever it is. But when it comes to just saying, okay, we're just going to allow it because we'd rather have it available, at least we can regulate it and maybe we can make some money off of it by taxing it. At least the mindset in Ontario that like, you know, we have the LCBO, which is the government controlled liquor store. So you're buying liquor in Ontario. You're buying it through the government. Well, might as well make marijuana that way too.

So we get some extra money in the in the coffers to spend on whatever we want to spend on. But, but, you know, on the flip side of that, there's also the moral reason, right? It's like, do you think it's a good idea that 16-year-olds can smoke pot and go by pot? Like, when I was growing up in high school, I went to high school, like I said. In BC, I was actually on Vancouver Island for most of high school. There was a lot of pot. There was a lot of kids smoking pot and who dies, and that was back when it was illegal. I think it'd be interesting to compare.

I think it's one of those things that's probably hard to study because what kind of like 16-year-old is going to admit that they're smoking pot and doing drugs. But if there's more of that, now that it's legal or if there's less. But generally speaking, I mean, knowing what we know about marijuana and about drugs, like, is it really a positive thing that our government is saying it's okay? Because in some ways it's not. Like, I mean, you can look up studies about the links between young males using marijuana and links to schizophrenia and mental illness later in life. We know that there's more mental illness now in our society than there's ever been before. Maybe that's just that we're doing a better job documenting it. Maybe it's social media is driving us all crazy.

We have something to do with drugs. I don't know. But I think that, you know, just because we banned it before and it was bad doesn't mean that we should just like legalize it now and then that it's going to be good. Because I don't necessarily, I don't see the evidence that our world is better, that our societies are better, that our cities are safer, that young people are healthier, that that were a more, that our society is functioning better than it was prior to. legalization. I just don't see that now. Aaron, I'd be totally open and interested to hear your

perspective. Like, if you think that things have gotten better since drugs have become decriminalized or legalized, made more regularly available, I'm totally happy to hear the other side of the argument. I just personally don't see it. I think that's a very interesting question. When I think about what's going on on the street level, there are serious concerns. I would say that I would rather see a society at scale struggling with the use of marijuana than alcohol because we know that alcohol is involved in 50% of crimes. And so I've always been a proponent of concerns with legalizing and allowing alcohol use because it's part of violent crimes. It's 50% of all crimes. And so there are significant risks involved with specifically alcohol. And we do know

that even a glass of wine, as much as it's touted on regular TV shows, that a glass of wine can be good for your health. It actually isn't over the long term either. And so I think at that piece, I would lean on freedom, people's right to choose. The government legalizing it to me doesn't mean that it's good or bad. It just means that you have the right to choose, just like a cup of coffee, whether or not you want to put that into your body and circumstances dependent. I think my big concern is that I'm seeing a reduction in creativity. I feel like people used to be much more creative.

And some of these substances have long been understood to contribute to people's creativity and creating masterful works of art that we just don't know how they get there and you can say well maybe they could have gotten there without it but historically when you look at some of the greatest musicians the greatest artists they were often using some sort of substance to really hone that skill to really get into a form of flow state so I think I do worry about the government ever

deciding for the people they're supposed to serve what they should be doing with their bodies so that would be my broader concern Yeah, I know. I think I agree with you as well. Like when it comes to, you know, you're talking before about the various levels of government. And it's like, what do you want from each level? Because once you get to a federal government that's like making laws from a far off place, they don't really interact with you. So like I'm opposed to like big national programs. Like I don't think that there should be any kind of big national program. I think part of the problem with our health care is that it's two one size fits all. And it's like these laws are very restrictive rather than. allowing for companies to create a response to the needs in their communities or individuals or charities or whatever, the government is like, this is what you're going to have, and it just doesn't work. So, like, generally speaking, I think you're right. Maybe what I'm talking more about is, like, as a culture and as a society. Yeah. The idea, I agree with you

about alcohol. And it's interesting because, like, when I was growing up, again, the same thing. Like, everyone kind of drank alcohol. And you go to university and, you're really surrounded in this kind of like binge culture where like heavy drinking is just totally normal and that's just what you do and and now and I'm a bit older and I'm like thinking back to how unhealthy I was in university just in terms of like lack of sleep, lack of a healthy diet and having alcohol. It's like it's not good for your brain. It's not good for your ability to function. And I think that so much of, you know, we definitely are dealing with a massive issue when it comes to mental health problems. Like I think self-reported, it's like half of the women out there

believe that they have like depression or anxiety. And it's like, well, you know, are you doing the basics, right? Are you getting a good night's sleep? Are you, are you sleeping at the same time every night? Are you eating a high protein nutritious diet? Are you getting exercise or getting fresh air? Are you, like, kind of just like, again, like very basic things, which, of course, I think you're probably your parents, your grandparents taught you when you were a little kid. But it's almost like we've taken these things for granted and we believe all kinds of crazy things. And now all of a sudden we live in this world where we stare at our screens and we don't have a lot

of human interaction. You know, there's other questions that I don't think our political class would be willing to touch, but it's like, look at the birth rate in our, in our society. look at how few people are having children and it's like it's so alarming it's like it's like this is a catastrophe this is like an end of civilization concern when you have each generation like half of what it was like if the natural replacement level for a society is like 2.1 and you know the birth rate in Korea is like 1.1 like that literally means that each society each generation will be half the size the previous one, forget about what that will do for all of our government entitlement schemes.

I think in Canada, it's not quite a bit. It's feel pretty bad. I think it's like 1.5. You know, forget about how bad it will be for all of our, you know, pensions and our ability to pay for government and our ability to pay for health care. But, like, what do it do to, like, people, to, like, individuals? It's, like, not having, you know, the thing that has fulfilled your life for so many generations. It's like, what do you do? You have kids, right? And you raise those kids, and then those kids have kids. It's like, that's like, it used to be like a central feature of life. And now it's like, I meet some people that just don't have kids, don't want kids, no interest. And that's that. And they've decided. And it's like, you know, this is a big shift and a big concern. And I mean, yeah, sure, you can just have a huge massive immigration program where you let in a million people a year. And then, you know, your community service has to change. And people who, you know, people, people, people, people,

with different values and they might not be Canadian. They might not care that much about Canada, but they're here in Canada. And like, it just, it just changes things. Everything's different. And I think that that's something that we don't talk about at all. I think it's a problem. I think it's a concern that people don't want to have kids anymore. You, we will get to your two books because I think that that will be a great place to kind

of discuss those issues further. But would you mind telling me about starting True North? What was the impetus behind that? Yeah, sure. So, let's see. I've done a lot of things in my career, so I kind of started more on like the academic think tank side. I worked at the Fraser Institute. I went down and did a fellowship in Washington, D.C., where I worked at a think tank.

And I like that idea of promoting public policy through an organization. And so then I had a little bit of experience working in government. I went and worked for the Harper government in 2011 and it didn't work out for me. Like I wasn't suited to be a partisan or a political, but it was. great to work in parliament and have that experience. Anyway, I left and I started writing a column for the Toronto Sun and I worked at Sun News Network and I got like my kind of media TV experience and started writing and I really liked writing in the Toronto Sun. One of the things I would do is I break stories about immigration and about terrorism, about national security. And I decided to

start kind of like a think tank focus on these issues because there wasn't really anyone in Canada of doing it. And I, you know, I wanted to have my own organization, a very entrepreneurial and I want to do my own thing. And what I thought that thing was, was going to be like an immigration think tank where we provided, like, papers advocating or explaining good immigration policies, like sound immigration policies. And I did that at the same time as I was continuing to write in the Toronto Sun. And what I found, like, as an entrepreneur, you kind of have to go where your audience is, right? And where your customer is if you're selling something. But for me, it was like the people who liked True North and were supporting it were like, you know, the thing that we like the most about

what you do is your journalism. Like the academic think tank stuff is like, we'll take it or leave it. But when you break a story in the Toronto Sun or you have a big news story that's like going all over Twitter, that's what we like. And so I kind of pivoted. And I was like, okay, I like doing that too. That's fun for me. And that's like, you know, you live in this world where once you start doing research and you start doing access to information you start breaking stories it's like a floodgate right it's like it's like it's like a couple trickles and it's hard work hard work and then all of a sudden it's like yeah everything you touch is like people are sending you stuff people are calling you MPs are giving you stuff like and and it just became like I had like so much stuff that I wanted to

write about and I couldn't fit it all in the Toronto Sun so I just basically started a website hire some people to help me and we had like instantly had an audience had people willing to fund it and it was just like exciting. It's like we're doing journalism that no one else in Canada's doing. A lot of the legacy media feeling comfortable talking about immigration, so they're not really willing to touch it, but it's like, you've got a lot of problems here. There's people that are coming in that shouldn't be. There's bad people in the country. We're going to be like, unafraid and we're just going to write about it and talk about it. And then it kind of snowballed. So it was like, well, immigration is too narrow, right? It was like, there's so many other stories too, and there's so many

other concerns that we have for a culture and our society. Let's just broaden it. And it's just continue to grow like like I think we've been doing it to since 2016 2017 no 2016 yeah 2016 and I would say we pivoted towards journalism like 2018 and like every year it's like growing doubling and now we're getting more into podcasting and obviously we have to evolve because so much of our distribution social media our huge huge audience and like our brand butter was Facebook. And then all of a sudden, the Trudeau government created a law that Facebook didn't like, and they just completely cut off all news. So it was like almost like we had to start again. It's like, you know, we got, we have all these like hundreds of thousands of people on Facebook

that are watching our content every day. And all of a sudden now it's like banned, like no content, you can't see anything. And same with Instagram. So we had to kind of pivot now more towards like YouTube, Rumble and podcasts like Spotify. So yeah, that's a fun thing about being an entrepreneur and having a business is, you know, there's never a dull moment and you always have to be on your toes. It's like, have a strategy for like, what are we going to do when this fails or what are we going to do when this dies? And I think one of the things that we've been able to do is just build up a pretty loyal audience of people who like our stories and they kind of go wherever we go. Like, you know, during COVID, one of the things that happened

was we started writing about people who were being fired from their jobs for not getting vaccinated or people who were getting really sick from the vaccine. And just stories that for some reason, the media, the legacy media, the mainstream media, I don't call them a mainstream media because I don't think they're very mainstream anymore. I think they're kind of almost fringe and niche, like such a small percentage of Canadians get their news from the CBC these days. But it's like, you know, they just didn't want to talk about it. They didn't want to talk.

They didn't want to talk about stories that were impacting so many people across the country. And we were hearing the stories and we wanted to tell them. And so we started reporting on that. We started reporting on the Freedom Convoy, and we just really kind of doubled our audience during that period and picked up a whole bunch of people who had never followed us before. And it's kind of cool how you stumble upon an audience and then you learn from them, right? Because if you're paying attention, you're reading your emails and you're reading your DMs on Twitter and you're reading your replies and kind of engaging with these people, we do a lot of events too.

So it's great to meet people and get out there in person. You know, they'll tell you what the issues that they feel are important in the country that are, again, being ignored by legacy media. I have a lot of critiques of the legacy media, but at the end of the day, I'm kind of grateful that they are the way they are because it creates many opportunities for someone like me, probably someone like you, too, to just carve out your own niche product and tell your own stories and not have to be, like, part. of that, but actually supplemented and provide a service to the so many Canadians who don't feel represented by whatever is happening over there. Out of curiosity, you've described something, and I think there's a few different angles to it. One of the concerns I regularly have for people who start their own thing is what's called audience capture, because as you try and figure out what your audience wants, you can get into

the realm. Like, I can see when I post a podcast what people click for, and I'm always cognizant. I need to continue to do what I love, what I enjoy. The topics, they might not get the most views, but I need to continue to enjoy the process and have the conversations that might not get all the views, but that nourish me and my intellect and my curiosity. How do you make sure that you keep that balance?

Because on the one hand, you do need to have that grassroots approach where people are coming to you with the story you might not know about. And they're like, hey, this thing's going on in my community is really getting me mad. And you're like, okay, maybe this is a story. But on the other hand, As you start to see, this is what clicks and views.

This is what's getting more and more engagement and making sure that you don't just chase wherever the new topic is that's getting that engagement. How do you find that balance? Yeah, that's a good problem to think about because I know like there's a lot of YouTubers that I know that, you know, they get a big account and then they have to kind of like continue to do like really click baity things to get the views and they feel like they're kind of compromising. It's always a struggle, right?

It's like sometimes there'll be an issue that will come up where I, I will just disagree with where, like, my whole audience is. Like, like, I don't know. Maybe, like, I'm trying to think of an example, like, or at least you perceive it that way, right? Like, like, when the whole, like, October 7th Israel thing happened, like, to me, that's like, that's like a 9-11 level, like, attack on an ally. And it's very clear to me. I've spent time in Israel.

I've spent time in Palestine. I've spent a lot of time on the issue. And I realize that like not all my viewers will have that same perspective as I do, right? So maybe a lot of them will just not side, not take it from the same perspective as I do. And then you read the comments, you know, oh, people don't like that, you know, they're calling me like a shill for Israel or whatever. And it's like, oh, are you funded by Jews or whatever? And like, sometimes you just have to ignore that, right? And then sometimes you have to say, okay, you know, True North is a Canadian company and our focus needs to be.

on Canada. There always has to be a Canada angle. So as much as like I would love to do like 10 podcasts in a row on Israel, it's like that's not what our audience comes to us for. So let's let's talk more about like how it impacts Canada. Let's talk about these protests. Let's like bring it home. Right. So so I don't think that's necessarily like changing your opinion. But there's been times in the past too. Like I'll give you another example. Like when Donald Trump first came on the scene. I didn't like him at all. I was not interested in him. And I thought that he was a snakeable salesman, basically. And I noticed that my audience did like him, right? They did. And it almost made me like pause because I think part of the reason that Trump became so successful

in the United States is because he was tapping into something deeper and that the people in the sort of elite institutions and the mainstream positions couldn't see it. They didn't understand it. and they initially just judged it as like very negative and wrote him off and called him all kinds of names and that was part of what fueled him because people were very like no we take this person seriously because he's talking about things that really matter to us and rather than just like your knee-jerk reaction like he's a bigot and he's an evil fascist or whatever it's like well why don't we take a minute to try to understand like why he's popular and why he won an election and who are these people that are supporting him. And that process, just trying to understand that is good because then

you understand a different element of your society rather than just saying, these people are full of hate and they're evil and they're wrong and I don't like them. Like, no, let's try to understand like what it is that's motivating them and why they have come to this point where they're electing a person like this that's so outside the realm of normal sort of political world. So I think it's good to take cues from your audience and listen. At the same time, you know, you do it for yourself, right? And it's your job and it's your life. So you don't want to take positions that you don't believe in. You don't agree with. Like I said off the top, like our guiding principle is truth, right? So you want to find the truth. But I do that. I think it's important to kind of

keep an open mind and listen to your audience. Like if everyone's, everyone, if every single comment in your comment section is saying one thing, you know, they're all really concerned about the WF. Well, I think the WF is a joke and it's not, I don't take it that seriously. But they really care about it. So let's spend some time digging into it and understanding why they're so worked up about it. And then you realize that there is something there that is worth looking at and criticizing. So I'm still sort of a big advocate of just sort of listening to, listening to the audience and finding out what it is that they want and seeing if there's anything there, basically. Interesting. One of the other challenges I'd say we've had since 2015 is so

many of our metrics of where we say we are on the political spectrum has shifted. I do feel like people, if they listen or if I talk to them, they talk to me like I'm a conservative. But I would say that I am and have always been a liberal. But what it means to be a liberal in 2024 is a completely different thing than when I started becoming interested in the political process and what issues are and how to think about them. I do believe in social programs. I do believe that they play a role. I think they can absolutely go too far when I think about specifically Serb and its impact. I look at the people who are most negatively impacted when government rolls out a lot of money are the people in poverty over the long term because when inflation hits, they're the first

to be impacted by inflation and start to see those negative impacts. So at the front end, we feel like we've benefited and over the next two to three years, we experience the consequences. So I I have perspectives on these issues where I would say I lean more liberal, but I feel like that definition has changed. And I'm just wondering from your perspective, where would you say you lie on that political spectrum and where does True North lie from your perspective? Yeah, it's interesting. I used to sort of play the game of like, I'm the original liberal and the liberals aren't

liberal because I fundamentally believe in freedom from government. I don't think that government should be a core force in your life. I think that the most important institution, society is a family. And that things should be taught by your parents, not by school systems. And I think I've kind of let that go because I don't think liberty in and of itself is enough. I think that you need to have morals and values and traditions to guide you, to build a strong society and to stabilize you. So, I mean, one of, like, my rules of thumb, if I'm, like, if I have, like, a problem or I don't

know how to solve an issue, I think of, like, I wonder what my grandparents would have done, or I wonder what my great-grandparents would have done, and kind of, like, go back to, like, the wisdom of the people who built the life that I'm so lucky to enjoy. So as far as as the political spectrum, I mean, yeah, I'm more conservative, I don't agree with conservatives all the time, but definitely skeptical of the government, skeptical of big government programs, very, very, very skeptical of our current prime minister who I don't have a lot of respect for. I don't take him very seriously at all. Like, he's a very serious person, and I think he's doing great harm to the country. And as far as true north goes, like I think that, again, back when I started it, we were kind of more like a conservative news outlet, like conservative opinion, conservative ideas. I don't think that you can really have like conservative news or liberal news, but we were doing the news that the liberal media wasn't doing it. Most journalists in Canada are liberals, like Big L liberals, almost all of them. The only ones that aren't are there ones that are NDP. And so the fact that there's a sort of void in the legacy media that there aren't conservative voices, even in the National Post is. is run by liberal or people that are like mildly conservative but they apologize for their conservatism and they're embarrassed by it and they and they concede every issue to the liberals

but but but I think that like I said during COVID a lot of the people who came to us were not necessarily the ones that were identifying as conservatives there were people that just felt excluded and left out and left behind I think the trucker convoy was a great example of that a lot of people that were going to ottawa and and protesting were not publicly people and they probably wouldn't have thought of themselves as conservatives. They just thought of themselves as outsiders. And I think one of the things we're trying to do at True North is use labels less and try to just appeal to people based on the content and the stories and let our work kind of speak

for itself. But I think generally speaking, the things that our society needs are more tradition, more order, more things that fall on the conservative side. and away from the sort of like totally free libertine like everything on the moral perspective and then on a on a kind of government perspective I think that that basically the liberals think that all we need is more government the government can solve every single problem in our life and we just need the will to convince the people to basically concede give away their individual powers so that the government can step in and do more like free like we're going to we're going to be in charge of grocery store distribution and you're going to have cheaper price to the grocery stores and we're going to be in charge of health care, we're going to be in charge of dental programs, like taking away all of the things on the market side of the economy and turning them into government. I think that's like the last thing we need is more government. We need less government.

We need the government to get out of the way in so many aspects. There are so many things that prevent people from running a business or having a good life. It's like, when we talk about cost of living all the time, it's like, well, maybe if the government didn't take half your money, you'd have a little more money, right? Maybe if they didn't completely control the housing supply and how many houses are built and how a house can be built. Like, my brother has a business where he, kind of like a storage business, and he has a bunch of facilities in East Vancouver.

And it's like the craziest thing. He'll buy a building or lease a building and try to get it, try to get the zoning change so that he can do what he wants. And it'll take like three years, four years, and he'll have bureaucrats coming in. and engineers coming in to try to, like, tell them they have to make changes, these abilities, like, why don't we just let businesses be businesses? Why don't let people start businesses? Why do we have to have all these bureaucrats like meddling in in every aspect? You know, there's a reason why our economy is not growing. There's a reason why

it's really expensive. It's because we just have way too much government. So that's a very long answer. But basically, I think that, I think that people who want less government tend to be more conservative. Right. Would you mind telling us about two of your books, losing True North, Justin Trudeau's assault on Canadian citizenship, and no border, Justin Trudeau's assault on Canadian border security? Sure, yeah. Well, first I'll tell you about my first book was generation screwed and I wrote that. It's just about millennials and how the math doesn't work for us. And I wrote this book like 15 years ago now, maybe 10 years, no, 12 years ago now. And, you know, I should talk about more because so much of what I wrote about has come true

and is coming true for us. And it's like everything stuck against us and we just give way too much control and power and money to the government. It's a disaster. So that kind of helped me get my column in the Toronto Sun that kind of launched my career writing. So I'm thankful for that opportunity. And then losing True North, I wrote that book. It's actually an interesting story. My husband and I got married. We bought a townhouse together in downtown Toronto, and this was in 2013. And then almost right away, he started a business, and his business took him to California. And so he kind of like up and moved and took this opportunity. And there was a while where I just didn't know what I was going to do.

I was working at a TV station. I was writing for the Toronto Sun. I had a very like kind of Toronto-based life. And then he was over in the Silicon Valley. And he was doing really cool things and he was having all these amazing opportunities. And he was like living his kind of dream of what he wanted to do. But, you know, we were a newlywed couple that was living in two different countries on two different coasts. And so there was about like a six-month period.

where we were just apart and I didn't know exactly what for my career like where I was going to live. And so I just, you know, I didn't have a, I had nothing but free time. So I wrote, I wrote a book. And it was just when Justin Trudeau was first elected and I didn't like the things that he was saying about immigration and I didn't feel like he was being held accountable in any meaningful way. And I was had a lot of concerns. I was doing a lot of reporting on a lot of the problems that came to a Syrian refugee policy. and so I just wrote a book about what I thought Canada needed in an immigration policy and that kind of helped launch True North the first iteration when it was a think tank and it was incredibly well sold like the book sold tens of thousands of copies like it made us a lot of money

and we self-published it so it was it was like a huge a huge okay there's a big audience for this this is a great way to like kind of entrepreneurial like writing my own book on the side and using that as a way to make some money and um the the concepts were really uh what people wanted to hear and it was fresh because no one was writing about it so that was that that kind of helped me launched uh true north and then the reason i wrote no logo was just kind of a follow-up or sorry no logo no no border was a follow-up um because it was like two or three years into justin trudeau's prime ministership and all of a sudden Canada was dealing with this crazy problem of illegal immigration which has never been a problem in Canada before.

And I kind of analyzed the laws that he had changed the way that he was enforcing the border. What was happening in Roxham Road? I went down to Roxham Road in upstate New York on the border near Montreal and Quebec. And sought for my own eyes, interviewed people, documented what I saw, and kind of wrote the follow-up of like, you know, Canada is not a country that should. have to deal with this problem of not knowing who's coming and going from our country. And a lot of these people aren't the kind of people that we would allow. They would be inadmissible. So what's the point of having immigration laws and having rules about who can come and go?

You're not enforcing them. And that was a time. It is interesting. I really should write another book because the problem has just absolutely proliferated post-COVID. Like, it kind of went away during COVID. And so it's like if you look at the number of illegal immigration apprehensions or people coming in, just kind of completely disappeared in 2020, 2020, and now it's like back and higher than ever over the last two years. So yes, it's interesting. It's one of those topics that not a lot of

people write about. You don't really hear about it in the news, but people are really interested. Like when you write about it, your stuff will go viral and like people will buy your book and people will read your essays and people watch your videos because they're interested. They're like, what is happening? And yeah, you find kind of like interesting to see the the kind of people who are interested in that kind of story because it might not be the same as your normal audience again. I have to ask, do you attribute intent to Mr. Trudeau? Do you think that some of these policies are just mistaken, that he just makes a bad call?

Do you think that there's a plan by, like, what do you attribute when you look at the policies that you disagree with? Like, he comes into office early on. do you think he knows the consequences of his actions? Do you think he knows the mistakes or the fallout that's going to occur? Do you think that he's a thoughtful person you mentioned earlier that you don't really respect him? Do you think you could you sit down with him and you really try and understand his philosophy? What's what's going on behind the scenes? Where do you think you get in that conversation? No, I don't think there's any point in talking to him. I don't think there's any point listening to him. I don't think that anything he says is true or thoughtful or sincere. I think that he's like he's an actor playing a role and he fundamentally he's he's not a thoughtful person i think he kind of has like the knee jerk liberal reaction to everything and he's mung about it so he thinks that he's smarter than you and he thinks that he's better than you because he has these enlightened left-wing views and he has this like french pedigree and and and really he doesn't have a lot of

respect for the canadian people when i hear him talk i just think he's full of it that he's he's just he's delivering talking points. I mean, if you've ever seen the guy in the House of Commons when conservatives are trying to hold him accountable and you see how he will say the exact same words over and over and over again, I don't know if you've ever seen this, but he's done this in the House of Commons

from the time he got elected, where there will be pressing him on a scandal, and he will literally just say the exact same thing over and over and over again. He'll do it to the media as well. It's so disrespectful. I mean, it's fair to say that Pierre does the exact same thing bring it home.

like he's got his slogans and his lines just as much as Mr. Trudeau does. And Mr. Trudeau is in power, so he should be held accountable and he should try and answer questions. But politicians in general are bad for coming out with lines and not having a conversation like we're having where we kind of get into the issues and try and have a meaningful conversation. Fair. Yes.

Conservative. Sorry, politicians are, like, I would never be a politician because I can't do that. I can't just lie and say the same thing over and over again. And I don't like that. Sometimes I'll have a debate. with a friend or with my husband over, you know, whether Pierre Polyev is a force for good for the things that we believe in. And sometimes it's disheartening because you'll have to say something and you're like, I don't know if he agrees with that or if he's just saying that

because he's a politician and he has to say that. And I completely agree that they do that. And that they all have their talking points and that they have their slogans and that's part of the game. What I'm talking about, and maybe you've not seen this phenomenon, is that they will ask Justin Trudeau the same question 14 times in House of Commons, and he will literally say the exact same thing. He will say the exact same 20 words in response. It doesn't matter what, the way they ask a question, let's reframe it, let's ask it a different way, and he'll be like, like many Canadians, I spent the Christmas holiday with friends. And it's like, well, do you think it's right that you went to Jamaica and that you did this? Was it out of touch?

Justin Trudeau. Like many Canadians, I spent Christmas holiday with friends. And it's like, and he'll do it over and over and over again. And it's like, are you kidding me? Are you serious? Like, this is how you're going to engage in a conversation? I've never seen a politician. Any stripe, any party, any country, I've never seen them show that level of disrespect

where they won't engage. They won't actually listen to the question. They won't even come up with a slightly different variation of a way to say it. They will literally just say the exact same thing until you just shut up and move on to the next topic. And I think that that shows such a level of disrespect to the person asking the question, whether it's a reporter or opposition parliamentarian, and deeper, it shows such a level of disrespect to the Canadian public. And maybe you don't see it because I'll just clip him. And if you just see the clip, they're like, oh, well, whatever, he answered the question. It's like, no, he really didn't, right?

and like, you know, fine, politicians play a role and he doesn't want to say anything that will get him into trouble and he holds a party line and he has all the people around him terrified and no one speaks out. No one criticizes him and if they ever do, it becomes a big scandal like, oh my gosh, this little MP said this thing and like let's all hold that liberal MP to account. How dare you criticize the prime minister and then let's move on. It's like, you know, the amount of disrespect that you showed to so many different groups. of Canadians over the years and like, no, I never, I never expect a level of accountability from Trude. I don't think he's capable of it. When I hear him on TV or I hear him on the radio, I, I'm baffled that Canadians take him seriously, seriously. I just, I think that he is one of the most arrogant, superficial people that I've ever had the experience of interacting with. And I think he's been like that a long time. Look, I've known the guy for a long time. He was a, He was actually a teacher at my brother's high school when we were teenagers. And I had the exact same opinion of him back then when I was a teenager.

Like I thought he was a superficial snake. And like he hasn't changed. So it's like, yeah, that's who he is. He kind of looks like a movie star and he came to power with these like grandiose ideological ideas about how Canada could be better. And people bought into that dream and that idea. And he was always kind of like shoving the celebrity part down. down our face like why do you have 50% women in your cabinet because it's 2015 like that's not an answer right it's like we're trying to wonder we're wondering like why did you elevate a lot of

these women that don't only have experience but just because they checked a box or they you know it looks good to have 50% women 50% men um and and and a lot of people just swoon over that like oh it's progress oh it's amazing uh you know there's a lot of us that are just sort of more skeptical about that. Like, no, we live in a meritocracy. And if 20, 22% of your MPs are women, but then you're making 50% of the cabinet, that means you're promoting a lot of people superficially, not based on their experience, but just based on their gender, is that really the best way to organize a government? And he never really had to answer for that. The result was that he had a lot of very incompetent female cabinet ministers who failed, who went up in smoke. He threw

them under the bus and they're long gone now and it's like he only ever get the credit for that he never had to be held accountable because the people around him not just like his own staff and his own people but you know the liberal establishment around him the media that were just so moved by him and so touched by him and loved the idea of a feminist prime minister they just accepted it and went along with it and it's like you know now it's been eight years and a lot of people can see through it and they're like well they're not really that feminist like look at the way they keep throwing female cabinet ministers under the bus and completely disrespecting them and look at all the hypocrisy around their policy when it comes to you know they they say that they

um that again they're feminists and that everything they do leads to feminism but then they also refused to say women like one of one of their MPs was giving a speech in the House of Commons about um people who men straight and people who have babies people who are pregnant it's like they won't even say the word woman. It's such a far. So again, I mean, we could spend a lot of time analyzing Justin Trudeon's personality, but I just think he's one of the worst people to ever lead a country. The only part that I want to push back on a little bit is the whole, the reason I asked the question was because I actually think it would be incredibly interesting to see a person like yourself sit down with him. I saw, I watched all of the interviews he did with

CBC, CTV, like the various pundits that did it around the Christmas season. And I thought they did a good job. I think they did do some pushback on like, hey, look at the economy. Hey, look at the likelihood of getting housing. Hey, look at these issues. How do you feel? And I agree with you. No sincerity in the answer. No, hey, you know what? Maybe we could have gotten started on housing sooner. Hey, maybe we should have done A, B, or C better. Maybe we made some mistakes we could do better. None of that. But it would be so interesting to see a person like yourself who's really able to dive into the issues, sit down with him and watch him perhaps blunder that interview or just see him put under a fire where all of those people are maybe worried about

growing within their organization. They're worried about coming across his professional. They're worried about not pushing too hard. A person like yourself sitting down, I just feel like as a viewer, I'd be very interested in someone who has all of this deep analysis, who's written two books on his immigration work, sit down with him and really just try and get an answer beyond the superficial and he might not give that, but that would even be more fascinating to me to see that kind of back and forth. Yeah, and look, back in, back when Justin Trudeau first came on to the political scene as liberal leader, I tried. I tried to interview him. I reached out. I asked for interviews when I worked at Sun News sometimes, not me personally, but some of my colleagues would

have to like follow him in an event and try to ask him questions, but he's never been one to take questions from opposition-minded people. He would never sit down with someone like me. And I don't want to sound like too jaded and cynical. Like I would never even bother talking to him. Yeah, if they called me up and they were like, hey, Candace, do you want to interview the prime minister?

I'd be like, yes, I'd get on a plane like in a few hours and I would go and I would interview him and it would be great. I would appreciate the opportunity, but I don't think he would ever do it. And I'll give you an example. In the 2019 election, we tried to put a journalist, a true north journalist, onto the liberal campaign to be embedded.

So during an election, media companies can pay money, have a journalist that goes along on the campaign trail with a party. So you pay like $20,000 and they get to go on the plane or they get to go on the bus and they get all the access to go to every event and they cover the campaign that way. And it was like the first time I'd ever, I mean, Trunoff was pretty new at that point. But the people that I had working for me were established legacy media means for media journalists, people who had experience working at global and post media and all these things. And Trudeus people just said, like, absolutely not. You're not allowed in our events. And we'll kick you out and we'll have the police. And like, you can't come. And I got in my car and I drove to Hamilton to meet with his press secretary because I was like, what do you mean? We can't come cover the event. We're journalists. And this is Canada. It's free country. Like let us in. And he just kind of gave us like a snaky, smarmy answer like, well, you know, you guys are conservative or whatever. And it's like, You know what? You let a journalist from like the National Observer, which is a very known left wing, oh, let you let them on. Like, what's the difference? Why can't you let someone who's more like on the political right? And they didn't have a good answer. And it just became pretty evident to me that they didn't have respect for journalists unless they were willing to tow the party line. Like I said.

Are you worried about that at all with Pierre Polyev? Because he has been pretty against doing things uniquely in the very opposite direction with more smaller. organizations that are willing to interview him, but he has not been as interested in doing the, I would say, maybe legacy media approach. And he's been kind of accused of the same thing, but just almost in the exact reverse. Yeah, I think it's a taste of their own medicine. I'm not going to sit here and just demand like principle all around. I think that the way that the contempt that the legacy media has for conservatives, not just conservative politicians, but conservative people, conservative outlets, like the way that they treat the rebel news. Like they'll go to a press conference and the Trudeau Thugs will kick out the rebel reporter. And the rest of

journalists will just be like, oh, good, okay, good. And it's like, you don't have some fundamental principle where you believe in journalism for a democracy. You don't care. You're like, well, they're a rebel. I don't care about that. And so, like, I'm not going to turn around all of a sudden. But you're doing the same thing in the reverse. Yeah. You're playing the same thing in reverse, which is just going to perpetuate the same problem. No, I'm saying that for like 40 years, the mainstream media has shown derision and has absolutely ruined the lives of so many conservative politicians

by just being absolutely cruel and and like tormenting them and for a conservative politician to finally stand up to those people in the media who have a tremendous amount of power right like that whole thing when Pierre Polyev smacked down that Canadian press reporter and just said you know what you're saying isn't true

I said this what you're saying is wrong stop trying to drum up a scandal and everyone made it like a huge deal like oh this is a person of power uh going after someone smaller than them it's like no these politicians wield the sorry these reporters wield a great deal of power and they use that power to smear conservatives and we see it during every single election and so if you finally have a politician on the conservative side willing to stand up and just say no actually you're wrong what you're saying is lying you're not true Like, this is fake. I'm going to stand up to you and I'm going to say that. Like, I think all the power to that politician, like, Canadians can judge them and view them how they will. And obviously, I think journalism is an important foundation of a democracy and of a free society. But from my perspective, Aaron, I've watched like liberals manipulate this process, manipulate the media for so long and use it as a tool, a part of the liberal party. Like, next time there's an election, watch it, follow it, see how, whatever. the liberal talking point of the day, the mainstream media turns into the narrative of that day.

Like, oh, we're all going to attack Andrew Shear now because he said he was an accountant, but he actually had this different qualification that means that he wasn't a full accountant. We're going to spend four days of the campaign drilling in on whether Andrew Shear was actually an accountant. It's like, is that really the issue that Canadians care about that's going to impact, like, the country? Instead of like talking about the millions of scandals surrounding the liberal government, the media obsesses over whether Andrew Shear, what his Catholic beliefs are around sin. Like we're going to focus on that. It's like whatever the liberals want, the mainstream media will just like pounce on that. And we're getting to a point now where people just don't trust the media.

They don't want that. They don't like it. The media has less power now than they've ever had. There's a lot. There's so many podcasts out there that get just as many, if not more views than the CBC. And so it's like, at the end of the day, it's up to Pierre Polly of which podcasts he wants to do. If he wants to be disrespectful to the CBC and say, look, if I win, I'm not going to fund you guys anymore. I mean, that's just prerogative, right?

That's a politician he can do that. Canadians can judge him and say, well, I don't like the fact that he's mean to the CBC, so I'm not going to vote for him. But for every Canadian that makes that judgment call, there might be another Canadian that says, you know what, I like the fact that Pierre Pahliev went on a two-hour podcast with Jordan Peterson and had like a real. conversation in a down-to-earth way and talked about things that were broader than just talking points in politics they had a conversation about like life and meaning and philosophy and a lot of people will like really appreciate they'll get a lot more from an in-depth sit-down conversation with polyev than they will with like you know these end-of-year interviews that you're talking about that are like 10 minutes highly scripted exactly you could tell

exactly what's going to happen before they're written they all ask the same questions they all focus on the same topics that are probably not the same topics that you're talking about with your family around the dinner table about what really matters in your community, but the media have decided that those are the important questions, and they're all based on Trudeau's agenda. They're all based on the things that he wants to talk about, and that's the way it goes. I think the landscape is changing. And so just to go back to, I know you're trying to push me and get me to admit that somehow there's a contradiction between the fact that Trudeau's being disrespectful to mainstream, or sorry, that Polyeves being disrespectful to the mainstream media in the same way that Trudeau was disrespectful to the alternative or the independent media. It's like, well, one of these groups has all the power, right? The legacy media is incredibly powerful. And so the fact that Polyev is threatening that power, that's part of Polyev's political brand, right? It's like, I'm going to go after these gatekeepers. There's like a handful of people in society that have a lot of power. And I don't think that's right. So I'm going to go after them. I'm going to challenge them. He obviously still doesn't.

interviews with them. Like, he's still, he's still there. He's talking to them. He's not completely ignoring him. He's not having them arrested the same way that Trudeau is having Andrew, he had Andrew Lawton arrested, my journalist. He had, he said David Menzies arrested like 10 times over at the rebel. Like, I think there's a difference in kind between, between what's happening. And, I mean, I don't know. If you want to keep talking about this, we can. But I just, I, I think it's good that Pierre is pushing back against legacy media. sorry i apologize i'm not trying to encourage any sort of contradiction what i guess my

perspective is more that when i think of i watched that jordan peterson pierre pauliev uh video with great excitement because i was interested in what was going to come out of that and i think if you agree with everything that they think that was a good interview my frustration is the thing i actually admire about pierre is he's willing to take it to people he's been described as a bulldog he's been described as somebody who's willing to take it to people yet he doesn't do that and i would want to see him go into the fire do a long-form cbc interview with the exact organization he wants to take away and discuss defunding the cbc with the cbc journalist about how that process would look and why he's warned in doing that and bringing their

best reporter bring in the person with all the statistics and let him go toe to toe with the best of him and i don't say that because i get if you look at it through a conservative liberal lens you would have this, well, 40 years, the conservatives had this happen to them because of the liberals. I don't, I personally don't care about that. What I want to see in an ideal Canada is that my leader is the person who's willing to speak with anyone about anything and stand by their principles no matter what. And seeing Pierre repeat some of the same things in the reverse is just frustrating because it feels like that's going to be a liberal talking point.

That's the CBC's talking point now. Oh, he's not willing to do that. And so Justin Trudeau is encouraged to do exactly what he's doing. because Pierre is doing the exact thing in the opposite direction. And I just, when I put my ballot in, I have the same concerns as you. When I think about, did he say that? Did he mean it? Is he changing his look because he wants to?

Is he doing it for the votes? Is that what we want to see? Like, I get very idealistic when I start thinking about politics that I just want the best person, the most admirable individual to lead our country and to go and sit down in conversations. And when I see him choosing to do this, I get from a political perspective how it might gain support. But personally, I just want to see that person be admirable and go into the exact situations he's put Justin Trudeau in, grilling him about how he approached the S&C Lavlin scandal and all of those things. I want him to be able to take that back and go, hey, I can dish it out, but I can take it too. And that's the only fear that I have around this whole concept around how he's not doing those interviews.

I would just see that as personally admirable. Like there's a video that went viral that he was out in Cologne, I think, and he was on an Apple Orchard, and he was getting a. We're talking about Pierre Polyev here. You know, there was a reporter that was like, you know, you're taking a page from the Trump playbook. And he's like, what are you talking about? What playbook? What page, right? And it's like, we do see those interviews.

We see those advert. That's not a real heart. Like, that's not you, if you sat down with Justin Trudeau pushing him. This is a guy who clearly knew nothing. Like, the ones that go viral for Pierre are thoughtless, like, morons asking a question that they don't actually understand asking it. It's not the best of the creme de la Crem asking. him a tough question, being able to really dissect it and break it down. I watch a lot of the UFC and Dana White does the same thing.

He'll interview somebody and somebody will ask some thoughtless question about his thoughts on LGBTQ people and he'll give like a smirky answer that goes viral. But it's not actually like a thoughtful like, okay, break down. How would we do this with the CBC or how are we going to cut that red tape? Really break it down for me like he doesn't do that same where it's like with somebody who disagrees with him really going through it. are easy clickbait kind of videos that I like. I think it's kind of cool to see somebody eating an apple, destroying somebody. But it's not in-depth. I just saw Ben Shapiro do an interview

with Destiny. And it was like a thoughtful, thorough interview where they disagreed on some things. And that's, I don't think those easy ones where it's eating an apple are examples of him being truly grilled by somebody. Yeah, but like the point that we were talking about earlier is that he's not willing to do the interviews. But I think he is willing. Like the fact that we see him at press conference is getting scrummed by the media. I mean, those are, those are, that's who they're sending, right? That's who the media organizations are sending those journalists.

So if they can come up with a better journalist that can come, I mean, if you have someone in mind that you say, like, there's a really smart liberal journalist out there who has a podcast who's like really thought things through, I want to see that person interview Pierre Polyev. Like, I don't know peer that well. I've interviewed them a few times on my show. And let me tell you, when I have them on my show, I don't ask them easy questions. I really push him on the things that I disagree with him on.

And then I give him a platform to talk about the things that I think that he's doing a good job with. So it's not necessarily an adversarial interview, but it's an in-depth interview. You know, he was on my show. I think we talked for over an hour. And, you know, I think that that's something that I really like about Pierre. Previous conservative leaders haven't done that with me. I don't think a lot of politicians feel comfortable. Pierre is unique in that way.

But I'll just give me an example, Aaron. The previous leader of the conservative party, Aaron O'Toole, he did a podcast with the CBC. He did like a 20-minute interview. And there was a section where they were talking about defunding. And Aaron O'Toole talked about why he believed that the CBC was beyond its mandate and that it shouldn't get the funding. And the CBC edited that out. They cut it out. So they put the interview on their website, but they cut out that five-minute part.

Like we're not dealing with an honest actor here. We're not dealing with like, like, if I watch this interview that we're doing right now and I think it's like deceptively edited, I would be like really surprised because I'd be like that. That's like a low thing to do, right? You just assume you're doing a podcast, you're an interview. They're going to put it all up. It's all going to be up, I promise. Yeah, exactly. I know because that's like how normal people operate. I mean, like normal people just do what they say they're going to do and they try to be good honorable people. And the fact that the CBC did that, I'm not saying it was the journalist who conducted the interviews fall. It was probably. some editor or some executive or some person that was like, nope, that's not part of our programming and we're not going to allow that rationale to be out there. We don't want to be a platform for someone who's going to say that we shouldn't get this money. And so they just cut it out and it's like, well, when you're doing that, you're not really doing things in the interest of the public anymore. You're doing things in the interest of the CBC. And I think that, you know, you say like, oh, I don't care about the 40-year history of them being unfair to conservatives.

It's like, well, that's fine, but there are certain things that have happened that lead to you being skeptical or you being cynical or you're saying, you know, I'm not going to sit down with the CBC because I know you guys and I know what you're going to do. And I'm not speaking for Pierre. I think that he should do as many interviews as possible and that he should, you know, try to put himself out there in a way that Canadians can see that he's different than Trudeau, and that he's not just like a superficial career politician, that he has some substance and he's, thought things through and that he will do a good job. And that's part of what he's out there doing right now. It's like a two-year job interview, right? He's auditioning for the role of prime minister and Keynes have a lot of time to look at him and decide whether or not he has the character and he has the traits that we want to lead. I think that we're at a point where a lot of people are just completely exhausted with Trudeau. I can't imagine Trudeau going forward. So it's good that

we have an alternative. I don't think he's perfect. There's a lot of things I disagree with him on. But I think that when it comes to his style and his compativeness, combativeness and his willingness to, you know, tell someone that they're wrong, that's almost like unique in Canada because we're in a polite society and we're so timid. And usually it's all about conventions and politeness. And you don't see a politician doing that. You never saw the previous leader, Aaron O'Toole or Aaron Andrew Shear before him or even really Stephen Harper. you didn't see them really calling, you know, calling a spade a spade, whereas, you know, Pierre is doing that, and it's sort of refreshing from my perspective. I agree. This interview is going longer because your answers are so thoughtful and, like, I find it's so interesting to get your perspectives on things, and you're saying a lot of the things that I agree with.

So it's very interesting to get this. The last topic that I do want to cover, and it's a sensitive one, so I want to be careful on how I approach this. But I think one of the responsibilities of journalists is to cover topics. that are uncomfortable, that aren't always popular, that people don't always want to hear. But I think they need to be done sensitively understanding context. One of the areas that True North is covered is Indian residential schools and what's gone on, and some op-eds have been going in. And so I'm just wondering about the coverage of those topics, what your thoughts are on that

and how we kind of have this conversation. Yeah, sure. I appreciate it. It's definitely a sensitive topic just because I think that there's like an elephant in the room and there's a problem in our society when it comes to how Canada has historically and systematically, I don't want to say dealt with, but the relationship that they have with the native people in Canada, the people who were here before, you know, the Europeans came, the Brits came and developed a country. And I think that there's like a much, much, much deeper problem with the way that our government has created, like, there's a much, there's a broad problem. And we can get into that for sure. But when it comes to the issue of residential schools and the unmarked grave story that came out, look, again, I'm a journalist and I treat things with like a great deal of skepticism. I pay close attention to the news.

So I read the news every day. I read every outlet, basically like front to cover, front to back. I like to see what's out there. And so when the story first broke of the 215 unmarked graves that were discovered in Camloops, I read this story like 25 times. And as a journalist, I went to the original source. It's like, it was a CBC story. And I'm like, where is this coming from?

Because the story didn't make sense to me the way I read it. I read it. It was basically like, you know, this tribe put out a press report. release and this is what the press release claims and there was no like deeper questioning about it was just like this happened this is what they said and here we go and so I went and I read the original press release and I tried to figure out like what evidence do they have like they're coming out and they're saying that they discover 215 bodies basically and they're saying that their children as young as two but like what is the evidence here like what what prompted this press release

like why is it and it's like okay they use something called ground penetrating radar And they found disturbances, approximately 215 disturbances. And so I'm just trying to make sense of the story. And then all of a sudden I start looking at like the international reaction and the national reaction in Canada. And it was like it was just so mismatched. It was like, I was like, am I losing my sense of sanity here? Because, you know, I sort of looking into sort of talking to other professors who understood this ground penetrating radar and what it is and what it does. the purpose of the technology is to discover abandoned, like, oil wells so that they can, like, reclaim them.

So it's a really rudimentary technology. Anyway, all of a sudden, you know, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and CNN are saying that cannot commit genocide and that there's mass graves and there's hundreds of children discovered and the bodies were exhumed and that they have evidence and that they have evidence and that they have evidence and there's no report yet and the report is coming out like in fact. And it's like, well, that's not what the First Nation is saying. The First Nation is just saying that they have preliminary evidence. And there's no report yet. And the report is coming out like in six months. So it just seemed to me that there was like a total mismatch between the information that we had that was confirmed and the narrative and the story. And then all of a sudden you had all this contrition and all these grieving people.

And I think that's what came from like the broader issue, the deeper issue in Canada of like how Canada has had the relationship that has had with the native people of this land. that that basically Canadians just feel really bad about the situation and they're willing to accept anything, anything that said, like, okay, your government was evil, this program was awful, it was basically concentration camps and you committed genocide. And it's like, that's, that accusation is not backed up by history, by records, by any previous, you know, truth and reconciliation commission or any data that we have out there. But Canadians are kind of like willing to accept it because they just feel awful about our. our history and what's happening. And I just, I just like, okay, it's important to correct the record and have the truth out there. Like, like, there were no bodies that were discovered. Maybe there will be, but, like, there's no, there's no missing children. There's no, if there were children that were murdered at residential schools, we would, we would know about it. We would have their names, who would have their records, who would have their birth records.

And so, so the, the whole story just kind of got, got taken away. And so, you know, at first we were super, like, careful and sensitive. And I understand that's a very sensitive topic. I also just think it's bad for people to believe something that's not true. It's not a good thing for First Nations children to grow up in Canada believing that they were the victim of a genocide. If it's not true, believe that they were sent off to schools to get murdered and that, like, priests and teachers were killing children

and then burying the middle of the middle of the night. Like, that story is just so, it's wild it's it's so and it's so emotionally driven and you know if there's evidence of it it turns out that that is what happened then we should we should know that and that should be part of our recorded history but like one news report in the middle of the summer with an accusation in a press release doesn't change like all of the recorded history that we have and so you know like i said at first we just wrote a story here and there questioning like well this is what we know so far, this is what's been verified. There's no mass graves, right? There's no,

there's no bodies that have been uncovered. There's been new excavations. And then, and then after we started writing that, we attracted some sort of like more academic people like university professors, historians, people who really knew the issue deeply. And we just published a book called Grave Error, which is a compilation of essays from these professors who sort of look at the records, the records of enrollment in these schools. They look at the number of children who did sadly die during their time at residential schools, the cause of death, the reason. You know, we have the records. It's not like it's just like a big black hole mystery. Like we know how many kids died at school. We know their cause of death. And yeah, just looking

at the actual policy of residential schools. Like, for instance, it was never compulsory. It was never mandatory. At most, maybe a quarter of First Nations children who ever went to these schools. So just sort of bringing some facts into the story. And I obviously want to preface this all, Aaron, by saying that obviously there's a problem in Canada. Like I grew up in Vancouver and went to high school in Campbell River and there's a couple of native reserves in Campbell River. and, you know, it was kind of shocking to me to see how, like, different it was, that there was, like, a high school where, like, half the kids lived in Campbell River and the other half lived on Native Reserves, and then they came into Kemper River,

like, the difference between the Native Reserves and the kids that lived in Kemble River, like, it still strikes me as odd that we have this kind of, like, like, segregated system. And I think that there's a lot of problems in it, and I think that the Canadian government has made a lot of mistakes along the way. I mean, the conversation we were having earlier about how government creates more problems and it solves and more government problems and more social programs and social programs

usually don't actually help the people that they intend to help. They actually hurt them. This is all kind of like part of my criticism of having a big strong federal government, a big liberal government. But when it comes to that story of the unmarked graves, it just frankly isn't true.

To pull this back though, a lack of evidence is an evidence itself. And to the point of like the impact of that story, it and the 215 has resulted in a significant amount of funding. And I'm in the Stolo territory and our area has received funding to do that research, to go through the areas where they believe there may be unmarked graves. So there could be more information coming as a consequence of a story that might not have been aired exactly accurately to your point. But there may be benefits for the communities because if nobody knew, there wouldn't be a lot of funding to look into this. Now, because it's a national conversation, there's funding available to do the research we need to do. But do you think, I mean, I'm sorry, are you going to find something?

Like, there's funding in your area to try to find bodies of kids that may have been killed in these residential schools. Like, like, do you have the names of the kids that are missing? Like, what kids are you looking for? The children, the concern that I would have is when you point to records, And the individual Rodney Clifton, who wrote the article, was like, well, why isn't there any chief in council who've come forward with requests? Well, like, I'm on council for my community. We are behind. We're two years behind on our audits.

We're trying to figure out how to address our housing issues. Like, we are not sitting in a room like, hey, what should we draft a BCR, a band council resolution about today? We are working to address so many issues and we're treated like a municipality with very little funding. And so when he made that comment, it was like, maybe you don't understand how ban counsels work, but most of the time we're behind and overwhelmed with all the problems that we're trying to deal with. And so to the point of like which kids, we're talking about over 100 years. So certainly some of those records, A, could be falsified. B, not everybody may have been documented. And C, if a child did pass away, the fact that they could falsify those records or not have documented some people coming into those schools to begin with would be some of the problems with the claim.

that there's no evidence for these children, and so many of the parents, again, being a sensitive topic, they had no faith that anybody would care. There was a well understanding, even locally, that if the Indian agent said something, you did it. And if you didn't, you had a problem. We have spots in the lower mainland where indigenous people were hanged. And so the power imbalance during that period would not have led people to rush in and go, oh, I'm sure journalists care about what our circumstances are for so many Canadians they had no idea Indian residential schools even existed and that's now being taught but to think that anybody cared about these problems 50 years ago 100 years ago is kind of foolhardy so when I saw that

it was like well maybe we're not putting in ourselves into the context of what those times may have may have had on people but but you're conflating times too right like when you're talking about how there were first nations or natives that were hung in the lower mainland like I I'm sure, I mean, do you know the dates that that happened? My guess is it was in the 1800s. Like, when we're talking about residential schools, most of them opened, like, inner war period. Like, we're talking about, like, the 30s to the 60s, right?

Or maybe the 20s to the 60s. First of all, you know, the 20s were a time when the Spanish plague was, you know, killed a quarter of the globe population, right? Like the average, you know, one and four children were surviving to the age of 18, right? So like people just died a lot more frequently back then. But to which people celebrated Joseph Trutch within our region, he said the extinction of indigenous people will come at the consequence of many of these diseases. So they're not a problem to worry about, which is why he downsized Indian reserves, which Douglas gave anticipatory reserves to. So the kind of overall ethos during that period was that all these people are going to die anyway, so we don't have to worry about them.

So it wasn't like there was a lot of love for indigenous people during some of the periods we're talking about. Well, okay, so I was talking about in an entire population, not just First Nations. Like everyone was dying from the Black plague, right? People were dying. And I'm sure you can find awful quotes because it was a different time when people had different views. I'm sure you could find quotes from First Nations saying awful, horrible racist things about white people, too. you can find awful horrible quotes but white people. Like, I don't think that the two sides had the best relations back that.

But one had all the power and one had none of the power. Yeah, there's definitely like regrettable circumstances. But Aaron, I'm talking about, like, the fact that there's claims that there were hundreds of children that were murdered in these schools, but we don't know the names of those kids. Like, we don't know who they are. Like, I mean, I'm saying this as a mother. Like, if I send my kids off to school and they don't come home, like, I'm not just going to say, like, oh, well, oh, well, no one cares anyway. So I'm just going to, I'm not going to talk about it. I'm just going to go along. Like, like, if something happens to your children, you're going to let it know, even if it's just in your community, like, you're going to have a record that's that your child died at a school. Like, even if it's just that you, that you keep that record in your community, maybe you don't go tell the white sheriff down the street because you don't trust him. But the idea that there's just all of these children that were murdered by nuns and priests and teachers. Like you say like a lack of an evidence is an evidence, that's a pretty, that's one of the worst accusations that you can level against another human being.

But it's not against a human being. It's against a broader system, right? It's not one. I'm not saying this guy was responsible, which to your point would be incredibly disrespectful. It's that the system would have caused these deaths, these people working within the system. I actually have a lot of sympathy for the individuals who worked with them. We do know that many of the people who wanted to work in Indian residential schools over the past 100 years were not the most well-intentioned individuals. That going up into the middle of nowhere and working with kids was not something many people wanted to do. And some of them had perverse incentives, dark incentives and harmful ideas on what they would be able to do if they ran those.

So like a bunch, so the government recruit a bunch of murderers to go off and like kill kids. Like I just am trying to understand the accusation because, again, like, because we're writing about this is a super controversial topic. I've heard from a lot of Canadians. I really respect what you're saying and I'm happy to continue this conversation as long as you want because I think I can learn from you in this instance because you're a lot more connected to it than I. But I've heard from people who say, you know, there was an Indian residential school in my community and they got more money than the public schools or the Catholic schools and they had more resources and they had. had better teachers and they had nicer buildings. And I've talked to people who were graduates of these residential schools and they say that it changed their life and it made them on a better path towards succeeding in a modern economy. So like there's two sides to it, right? It's

like I'm sure a lot of people went to school and had a miserable experience and they were homesick and they were sad. A lot of people really wanted their children to attend these schools because they sought as an opportunity for betterment. Like I said, the schools weren't compulsory. They weren't mandatory. They weren't going and scooping people up from their house despite there there's a there's a sort of a thought that that that was happening that the Canadian police were going door to door and scooping kids up and taking them to these schools. That's a myth as far as I can understand. People wanted the schools and sure like in any environment there's going to be an abuse of power there's going to be there was abuse

and there was horrible unspeakable abuse and it's tragic and anyone who is involved in that should be held accountable. There's a reason we got rid of this program. It obviously failed. It didn't work, although some people did benefit from it. But fair to say that churches have had a system to protect their own, not just with indigenous people, but there's documentaries about how they've moved people around to avoid the exact accountability that you're describing. What churches? There's, man, off the top of my head, there's a Netflix documentary called, like, mother something, and she was a nun, and she worked within the system.

In Canada? In the U.S. Okay. And that she was murdered and that a few of her colleagues were murdered and that the priest, they have documentation that he was committing these atrocities. They have documentation that churches knew and that they were deliberately moving him around. I can't remember the name of the documentary off the top of my head. But like this isn't controversial that this has happened.

Yeah, I think that there's been abuses in power and they used to happen at churches and now they happen in other places. I just think, I just think we should be careful about clinging and jumping to this narrative. Like, I mean, for you as a, I don't know, your, your, your, your first, your native, your first nations. Yes. Yeah. From Chihuahawafel, yeah. Okay. Sorry, I don't want to like mislabel you, because I, in Campbell River, all my friends who are native, they would call themselves native or they would call themselves native. I'm fine with that term. I'm also against the, the political correct nature of, like, I don't care of you. Okay. I just don't want to, like, offend you or be. But like if it were my community and all of a sudden they were like, hey, Candice, like my family's English and British and we've been in Canada for 300 years, if all of a sudden they told me like, you know, you were the victim of this like horrific atrocity that may or may not have happened and you're a victim, like I for my community, I wouldn't want to walk around with that mantle of I'm a victim.

And one of the things I noticed when the first, when the unmarked grave story came out and I questioned it, we're like, like people were really angry and attacking me. A lot of them were First Nations people or Native people who just were like, F you stupid idiot, shut up, you'd try to kill us, you know, your settler, you're illegitimate here, like just really nasty stuff. And I saw the pain that they had. And I felt for them. It's like they're told that they're a victim.

They're told that the society that they live in tried to systematically eliminate them, like genocide, that murder them, mass murder them, that kids in the, schools, like their parents and grandparents would go to school and get murdered. Like, how are you setting these kids up to be successful citizens in a society? Like, forget about, like, verifying facts and how many kids died and whether it happened or whether it didn't happen. But it's like if, like, this narrative that's being pushed, telling little kids, little First Nations kids that their country tried to kill them and that Canada is an illegitimate

settler state and that you want to have the land back so you're going to like get these awful white people off the land and give it all back and have this like utopian idea that someday you'll go back to like living freely in the forests with like mother nature and having this like beautiful life like that's just never going to happen right and it's such a bad message to tell little kids like I think that the messages surrounding first nations should be much more empowering like we should talk about how like incredible it is that these people lived off the land and how they were warriors and how they fought for their kin and how the men were strong and they took care of their families and how the women like raised children and in these communities like like i want

the stories around canadian first nations to be like positive triumphant stories of victory and instead what i see in the media is just like these sad sad stories of like okay let's pull up let's let's let's interview a guy who's like who like brother committed suicide at a residential school and like this is going to be the face of first nations he's drug addicted and he's he's he's got alcoholism and it's like the people that they're holding up it's like it's just such a sad message to be sending to a community and i just think you can do better than that like i don't want that message that canada committed genocide which is not the records don't show that like i have yet to see a government policy that says let's just murder them all

let's kill them all and here's how we're going to do it like like that's just not part of our history i don't think that we should write it in and i mean as far as as far as mistreatment of of first nations people at residential schools yes it's very well documented it's also well documented that a lot of the experiences were positive right so so so overall bad system gone why we don't do it anymore right at the same time let's not like invent things about the history that probably didn't happen and just for the sake of, like, getting some more money for your band so that you can do some research that may or may not lead to anything. Like, from my knowledge, there's been a handful of excavations carried out

in First Nations communities across Canada, cost millions of dollars to the Canadian taxpayers. No human rains have been found, none. No human remains. So the places where people believe that there could be bodies buried, the few places where they allow them to exhum the bodies, there's nothing there. And it's like, eventually they're going to find something.

sure, eventually you're going to find a body. I mean, it's a big country, and there are people living here and people die. But, you know, some of the news stories there, and that came out afterwards, it was like, you know, there's a place where they found 715 unmarked graves in a community in Saskatchewan. And then someone came forward and said, well, that's a graveyard. That's a known graveyard. And it's not just a graveyard for the residential schools. It's not just a graveyard for the First Nation.

It's a community graveyard that includes the bodies of both, like, white Canadians and First Nations. why are we pretending that that's the same thing and adding it to this tally of oh these are all the dead children when when really what we're just talking about is like an abandoned graveyard right and again it's like it goes to the narrative because people just see the headline mass graves found lots of dead kids kids were killed genocide happened and that's the message that they take away and and it's just from my perspective creating so much division so much hatred so much like contrition and sadness like you see they have this national day of a child wherever it wears orange just walk around with a feeling of like existential dread like I hate my country I hate Canada I hate what we did

we're so awful we murdered all these kids and it's like that's just such a bad governing ethos like that's such a bad thing to think about your country even though the history of the entire world is full of awful events and wars and people murdering each other like that's like the history of the entire civilization of mankind you know Canada should be a story of like triumph it's like look at this amazing society that we've built. We had built it through different groups coming together. We had the French, the English, the Scottish, the First Nations. They came up with these treaties. They built a civilization in a completely barren, like, frozen tundra, place that no one else in the world wanted. And we've created this amazing society that's so rich and so abundant and so well

educated. And let's be the future. And like people from all over the world want to come here. Let's build. Let's be like a tech innovative hub. Let's like. be home to like the most successful people, the freest people, like strong communities, growing birth rate. Like, like, let's find like a positive message that we can all rally around and be like, yes, I love Canada. They made a ton of mistakes and I hated that residential school program. But look where we are together now. We're rich and like we're solving all these problems. We're curing cancer. And like, you know, AI is being developed here and Bitcoin or whatever. Like we're doing blockchain. It's just like Canada could have this like really exciting

youthful, energetic future. But instead, it's like the things that we choose to focus on. It's like, all right, let's spend like another year talking about like how horrible things were in 1930 and this like horrible thing that may or may not have happened. It's like, okay, all right, if that's what you want to talk about, fine. But that's like, that's just not like an inspiring thing that I think that we should dwell on a waste or time. I think it's important, again, why we publish that book, Grave Error, is it just try to correct

the record. And you could read Gravera maybe, maybe read it and then come on my podcast and we'll have a debate about it because it sounds like, you know, you see things at different perspective in a different way and it's possible to have a blind spot and I'm missing it and that there is a real reason why we should be spending all this money trying to excavate and see what we find. I mean, I'm open to that possibility, but what I didn't like was like the mass, the gloom and the message that we're. we're sending to kids that Canada commits genocide and we kill kids and that we tried to kill First Nations people, which I don't believe is true. There is a lot there. First, let me say, I have a lot of admiration for you for being willing to share and talk about this issue because I can sympathize that it's a very difficult issue and you're likely

not in the majority of people. And so it can be challenging to do those types of things. And I'm sorry that people had such a negative response to you bringing this information about because initially my reaction was like, oh no, like. you're going there, but then I really thought about the value of journalism, and it's to have these honest conversations. People aren't always going to love the story, but the story needs to be told in different perspectives and analysis and information needs to come about out. Just because something sensitive doesn't mean that it shouldn't be covered like every other story. We should be

respectful and kind and generous and maybe give deference where deference is needed, but we need to have an honest conversation. And that's why I was excited to kind of have this conversation, not because I think I'm all right and you're all wrong or you're all right and I'm all wrong, but because this is a complicated topic. It's about history. And we have to be able to have tough conversations about history to your own point. I do think that working as a native court worker, assisting indigenous people through the legal system, their whole philosophy right now is I'm a victim. The world has been terrible to me. They've been terrible to my parents. They've been terrible to my grandparents. And I've never been given a fair shot. Some of those I think are

warranted. I think a lot of those claims that the world has not been fair to them and their parents and their grandparents and they've experienced atrocities and intergenerational trauma is real. I think all of that's valid. The problem is you have to wake up tomorrow morning and make your own decisions. And you can't just every time a problem arises say that it's somebody else's fault and you're not going to take responsibility. It's why I'm a huge admirer of Jordan Peterson is because he says you can come up with all the things that why your life sucks and why it's not fair. But you still have to wake up tomorrow morning and make your bed and live your life and try and improve things for people. So maybe there's less suffering. Maybe the world's a better place in the grand

scheme of things. I do think that I support the research going on right now because if there's one grave, if there's one hundred mark grave, I want to know about it. And so I'd be willing to invest that money. It's not really my money, but I'd be willing to support those initiatives to get the final answer. And if there isn't evidence, then we can have closure on the issue. But I think it's important that we make sure that we know the answer to a question like that in order to have peace. Just like if you're looking into the Holocaust and those histories, you want to have definitive answers to some of these questions. But Candace, I have a great admiration for the work you do. I have a lot of respect for the challenges you face, bringing nuanced perspectives to complex issues.

And it's why we've gone so much longer than a usual podcast does is because I actually really like how you think about things. And when you walk through an issue, I don't think we get enough of. that. I think it's really admirable the way you break things down and find ways to connect things. And I'm just, I'm honored to have been able to share the time with you and to be able to learn from you because I think you put a lot of work into making sure that you understand issues before you report on them. And I just find that work so, so valuable. Well, I appreciate that. Can I just ask one question then just to go back to, I know, I know it's been a long time. I don't know if you have to go because you asked me if I had any

time. I have to pick up my kids from school and have an hour or something. But, um, Okay, so you say that you want to do the excavations and you want to spend the money on the research to find closure, right? You're either going to find something and then we can talk about that and address it and properly mourn or whatever, or we'll find closure. Do you think that if they do, like at what point with excavations and research and like, is it going to take a decade? Is it going to take 50 years? Like, will there actually be closure if you can't find what it is that you think you're looking for? And then the second question is like say the price tag for that is like a hundred million dollars or five hundred million dollars or a billion dollars or five billion dollars like at what point do you think that maybe the money would be better spend like on social programs or on education programs or on scholarships like like do you do you worry that this isn't perhaps the best use of public money because he says it's not your money. It's not my money. But I just wonder like if if I were to say, okay, we're going to earmark five billion. million for unmarked grave research over the next 10 years. And I came to you and I said,

Aaron, would you rather that $5 billion go towards like scholarships or maybe go towards like building statues of native heroes across like Canada or like helping, you know, like kind of again to my positive message, like helping tell positive stories of warriors that did incredible things for First Nations. Like like, you know, it's a trade of everything in government's trade up. So do you think that that $5 billion would be well spent on that research? To the first question, I would say they've already identified specific sites. So there's no real risk of having like this, like we're researching everywhere and the oceans and anywhere that kind of comes up. I think this is already site specifics from what I'm hearing within like some of the researchers who are doing things here.

They've already identified spots that they're looking and we should get news within the next six months to a year. Would you find closure? Like if they came back, because there was just an excavation that got finished a couple months ago and they found nothing. So is that closure? I think so. We're not going to worry about that anymore. We're not going to tell our kids that they were kids. We're not going to tell our community that were kids murdered at that site anymore because they didn't find it.

So it's done. I think that's closure. Okay. I think whether or not people want to report, to your own point, whether or not the CBC wants to write that story, I don't know. I think you'll be willing to write that story, which is, again, why I think the word. work you do and the work your team does is valuable because some people, that's not going to get a lot of clicks, that's not going to get a lot of views, and it's not going to go along with the narrative we have. To the point you made a while back, I do think that the rate of Indian residential schools were as diverse as the population we have today. I know for a fact that I know elders who have been to the residential schools here, and I know that they weren't glossy, great places.

I know people who have said, I'm not going to tell you what I went through. I'll tell you this little thing, but I'm not telling you the meat of it. I know that they tried to destroy our language. I know that they tried to destroy our culture. I've spoken to those people. And so I do think that to your point, we need the good and the bad. I don't want to just see indigenous people struggling on the streets and hearing about how they're overrepresented in the criminal justice system, how they're overrepresented in drug use, how they're overrepresented in like sexual exploitation. I don't want just that story. That's why I interview chiefs, elders, experts, community leaders, people who are making a difference because I think we need both of those pieces.

I need to understand the horrible things that happen so they don't happen again. And I also need to understand the good things and the people who are pioneering, like Chief Clarence Louis, who's trying to bring economic development to his community. I think you need that balance. And I do, to your second question about funding, I think you can do that with most things. You can go, do we want to fund the dentistry program? Or could we get a better health care system and have more doctors in our city? Like, we can do that with anything.

I just support the fact that whether or not it's primary. private institutions funding the research, or if it's government programs. I'm open to where the money comes from, but I do think that that's a worthwhile thing because many families that I know of and many of the chiefs I've interviewed have this looming question, who was lost, what was lost, and how do we come to peace with that, and how do we get truth and reconciliation if we don't have the truth peace covered properly? Because one of the things that I thought interesting, I interviewed one of the authors for the book, Gray, There, and they basically described it like, you know, we did the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. That was like 10 years ago. And during that process, they came up with a list of all the names of the children that they believed were killed and died at residential schools. And they had that list. And it wasn't a very big list. It was like a couple of hundred names, right? And so that was kind of not dealt with, but addressed. And it came up. And we had that. And then, and then and then now it's coming up again but the numbers are like much much much higher and so it's

like okay so we tried to deal with it we did have this discussion we had this community like it was raised and I mean I think it's unfortunate many Canadians don't learn about residential schools I learned about that when I was in high school that was part of the school curriculum but then I went to university in emminton and I know that some of my friends didn't know about it like they'd never heard about it they never learned about it so I think I think it's good that everybody's learning about it back then because I don't think that nobody was learning about it back then because I did but but now more people like I would say almost every Canadian probably now knows that there was a residential school program and that that it wasn't a very well one program

and that there was a lot of you know horrific things that happened at that school but it's like you know are we going to have to continue like is every generation or every decade is something like this going to come up and we're going to have to like like go through it again maybe maybe this is part of our history and what we have to do to have that reconciliation but at a certain point I just don't know. That's productive. Anyway, I know we had a long conversation. We've gone through it all. Yeah, the only thing I'll add is to your point about the 40 years of the conservatives getting the bad treatment. I mean, like, you can go to the missing and murdered women's inquiry, the truth and reconciliation. We haven't had 100 years of going through these issues. We're at maybe two or three years of real solid research and understanding.

So I don't think we're at the point where we need to go, whoa, well, we've done enough and we've done our part. We can put a close to the end of this book because a lot of the people are still alive today. do, I do have to wrap, unfortunately, this interview up. I think it leaves the door open. I'd love to speak with you again because I think, again, you bring really good perspectives. I have no disagreement with the value of the information that you're bringing in and the importance of having that different perspective. And I think other people are afraid to talk about this. So I find, again, that work very admirable. Would you mind telling people how they can connect with True North and you on social media? Yeah, sure. And I appreciate, you know, the way that we have uncomfortable conversations is just, just like this. It's like maybe this conversation will inspire more people to have these kinds of conversations in their own lives. And so I really commend you and applaud you for work you're doing. Yeah, I'm Candace Malcolm. You can find me on Twitter. I'm on there. And our website is tnc. dot news, True North. Got a podcast comes out a couple times a week. And for a long time I wrote

a column in the Toronto Sun, but I'm not doing that anymore. So my work is exclusively now at True North. So connect with me that way. Aaron, I really, really appreciate. I think I think you're brilliant young guy and you've got a great tremendous feature ahead of you. So I appreciate you. I appreciate getting connected with you and meeting you and I really appreciate the interview. The honor is all mine. As I said, I think so many of the topics you cover aren't being heard about in other platforms. And I always go to your videos on what's going on in Parliament, on what questions are being asked on whether or not it's fair.

And so I'm a follower. I'm a fan of your work. And I think the work that you're doing is really valuable to bring about an enlightened and informed society. thank you again for sharing your time. Okay. All right, Aaron. Take care. All the best.