Nuanced. - 59. Darryl Plecas: Criminal Justice, Corruption & BC Politics

Episode Date: June 6, 2022

Darryl Plecas and Aaron Pete discuss the role of education, the importance of encouragement, criminology, criminal justice, safe injection sites, the defund the police movement, BC politics, the Legislature, corruption, and the responsibilities of journalists.   The Honourable Darryl Plecas was first elected for MLA (Member of the Legislative Assembly) Abbotsford South in 2013, and was re-elected with even greater support in 2017. Mr. Plecas courageously faced many controversies and challenges during his time as MLA. Aaron and Darryl discuss many of these challenges during the interview.   Previously, Dr. Plecas was the RCMP Senior University Research Chair and Director for the Centre for Public Safety and Criminal Justice Research at the University of the Fraser Valley (UFV). Darryl has worked with UFV for 34 years. He is the author or co-author of more than 200 books, international journal articles, and research reports addressing a broad range of public safety issues. Darryl also co-authored a book in his role as professor emeritus at UFV, focuses on how government professionals can make better decisions.  Dr. Plecas has proudly volunteered with many organizations, including the Salvation Army, the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC), the Justice Institute of BC, the United Way, the Abbotsford Police Department (APD), the Fraser Valley Child Development Centre, and the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse. He is also the recipient of numerous recognitions including the Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia Award for Public Safety, the CCSA Award of Excellence, the University of the Fraser Valley's Teaching Excellent Award, the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, and the Order of Abbotsford. Send us a textSupport the shownuancedmedia.ca

My name is Daryl, Daryl Plekis, and I'm someone who's a professor for many years. I'm now a retired professor. I'm Professor Emeritus from the University of the Fraser Valley. I had an experience as being this speaker of the house, which was a very interesting one. Perhaps we could talk about that. And now I'm one of the things I do, I'm a registered. United Nations consultant, do research for the Office of Crimes, Crime and Drugs. My last project was in Kenya, just this last year, and I continue to do research projects and write as I always did as a professor. So, you know, I basically never quit being a professor, even whilst I was in government,

I was still writing and, you know, doing the odd lecture and that kind of thing. Brilliant. I'm sure that a lot of people will be interested in your work at the BC Legislature and your service, but I'm interested to start because you brought such a unique perspective with your experience as a criminologist and as a professor helping other students understand complex issues. Can we start with why did you go into criminology? How did you, where was your journey into the field? of education, what pulled you into the university to begin with?

Okay, well, thank you for that question. You know, I suppose you could say I started university like so many other students. It's not so much with a plan in mind that, you know, I'm going to graduate and go on to do one profession or another. I mean, my big concern my first semester was just getting through the semester, like passing the first year. And in my early years of university, I was, I described myself as a, you know, I was, I described myself as a pretty much of an airhead. I mean, on a good day, you could see the air going

through my head, but, and then certainly if I opened my mouth, it was obvious that I, I didn't have a whole lot going on. But then, you know, I took a year off after my first year. I was up at SFU. And, and then I read in the newspaper that there was this new program being started, a new degree program called Criminology. So I went back to SFU and started, I was in the very first class of criminology offered. A very first class in English-speaking Canada at that time. And so my first semester I was basically getting along.

I certainly wasn't a serious student. And then in this one class, a research class we had, we were talking about rehabilitation. And the professor was presenting information about this very famous study to show that nothing works. Like, there's no point trying to rehabilitate people

because here we have proof that nothing makes a difference. And, you know, I put up my hand and said, well, I don't believe that. And so then the professor says to me, well, you know, we're going to have a debate next week, and you're going to take one side, supportive rehabilitation, and the other, he picked another student

to do the other side. Well, so I went home and frantically tried to figure out how this very famous professor made a mistake in how he did his research. And I really didn't know very much about research. And to this day,

I still can't remember how I figured this out that this guy had this flaw in what he did mathematically. I mean, I ultimately wrote an article about it and it got published. But so I go back in class and I give my explanation about how this very famous professor's research was flawed. And so after the class, the professor said to me, I need to see you in my office. And I honestly thought, wow, I am in trouble. This guy's going to tell me I'm out of my league, you know, go away, don't show your face at the university again. And he says to me, how'd you like to write an article? Well, I mean, I certainly wasn't a good writer, but he said

he had helped me out. And ultimately, I did write an article and I got published in the Canadian Journal of Criminology. And it was, you know, showing how. this very famous piece of research was fundamentally flawed. So that was my first thinking about, gee, maybe I'm interested in criminology. So up then, I'm not really thinking so much about criminology or criminal justice per se. I certainly wasn't thinking about being a professor. I'm just thinking about, gee, now, you know, this is interesting stuff. But it really was a catalyst in getting me to be a serious student.

because after that I never got less than a perfect mark, even in grad school. But I had a perfect GPA at the end of the day. Simply because, you know, I loved it, and which for me was a big deal because I never went to high school. I was in grade 11, and then, you know, like so many kids at that time, we skipped out of class, you know, skipped school almost every day. and then eventually, you know, early in the first semester in the fall, I got the boot and never went back and was fortunate enough to go back as a mature student because you could back in those days,

which was also helpful at the end of the day to the way I've approached being a professor. So anyway, so I'm finishing off my degree, and my last semester I needed one class to graduate, And a person who was labeled as the world's top criminologist came to ASFU as a visiting professor, Marvin Wolfgang, very famous guy. And I took a class from him. I was, me and one other student, because, you know, this is kind of frightening. And the class was called techniques of assessment and prediction.

So there was two of us, and somebody who was already, he had his Ph.D. So at the end of the class, my classmate, you know, he wanted to go to Cambridge. And so he went to the professor, Marvin Wolfgang, and said, well, could you write me a letter so I can go to grad school? And the professor said, well, you know, I'll not only do that, but if you want, come to the University of Pennsylvania. And it's a full ride all the way there. Don't worry about the money. You're in. And so I thought, oh, gee, you know, maybe I'll ask for a letter, too.

So I asked for him if he would write me a reference to go to Cambridge, and he did. And it was actually just one sentence in his letter, and I got accepted. So I'm ready to go off to grad school at Cambridge. And that same year, just after I got married. And so my wife and I went over to the U.K. as part of her honeymoon, and we went to Cambridge, and she said, I'm not going to like living here for a year. And so I thought, okay, well, we'll just put this off for a while.

And I went off to work for the correctional service of Canada instead. So that was just on ice. But I was still thinking about going. So I went to work for corrections as a what's called a living unit officer, you know, part correctional officer part, a caseworker. And there was a conference at the Harrison Hot Springs Hotel. And I went to that conference as a CSI employee. And then it was like 4 o'clock in the morning.

I'm sitting in the hot tub at the Harrison Hot Springs Hotel with the person who was the head of the criminology program at UFA. And he says, how'd you like a job at UFA? He was actually one of my professors when I was at SFE. He says, he said, I'm going to, whoa, this is crazy stuff, right? Like I'm just turned 27. So, and I don't have an M.A. I've just got my B.A. So, but he said, well, you got an interview at 10 o'clock the next morning. And, you know, it's 4 o'clock in the morning when he's telling me this. And I'm thinking, well, this is probably not going to go very well, because I've had a few drinks, right? I've had more than a few drinks. So I'm in that interview at 10, and I'm thinking to myself, I better not throw up here. And I can remember to this day, the dean, who was doing the interview, said to me, you know, asked me one question or another, and I just, you know, at one point, I just told me answers, well, I don't know. But they hired me anyway.

And I never looked back. I was there for, well, I think, 36 years. Well, I was there since 1979. So, and I'm there as a professor emeritus now. So at that point, I'm pinching myself, like, how did all of this happen? So I ended up not going to Cambridge. I went to UFE, and then, of course, SFU started a master's program of criminology. Well, this is convenient, you know.

So I enrolled in that. So I was a very first student at SFU to be in a class, they're a crim class. It was with EZAP, Fatah, and I was the very first person to get a degree in CRIM. And then when I went into the master's program, I was the first person there, and the very first person to get a master's degree in CRIM from SFU. Wow. So that, but I did that while I was working at UFE, and then ultimately I went on to get my doctor in education from UBC. And then after that, in terms of other education slash training, after several years at UF.E, I was lucky enough to take the management development program at Harvard University. And that was an exciting experience.

So I had this great education, and I had some unbelievable professors along the way. some of them who really impacted on my views about teaching. So again, going back to your original question, how did I become interested? So it wasn't so much I was interested in criminology when I started. And then later when I got a degree, I thought, well, gee, I'll work as a probation officer or work in corrections. And then just one thing happened after another, just luck whatever. And I was very fortunate because I was one of the first people. And that first class, grad class, I mean, all of them went on to fantastic positions.

Like one was head of research for the RCMP in Ottawa, one worked for CESA, one work for Indian and Northern Affairs, and one worked in a senior position in corrections, one worked as a prosecutor. I mean, we all ended up, in fact, the one ultimately, he became the head of the, the Krim program at SFU and there I was the head of the program at

UFV ultimately and as years went on of course my interest in criminology became greater I mean the only reason I didn't get a PhD in Krim and went off into higher education was because well they didn't have

a Ph.D. in Krim at that point at SFU or anywhere else in Western Canada. And since I was already teaching, I thought, well, what would be a useful degree is learning all about higher education. So, yeah, so it just, I look at it. It certainly wasn't by design. My teaching became by design after a while.

But the whole start of it was just as I described. Brilliant. The part that really stands out to me, and we're going to get into this later on, is that willingness to be courageous, to disagree with somebody in authority. So many people, like there's so many studies that show that if a doctor tells you to do something, most people just do it. They don't think about, is this right, is this accurate? Is this correct?

What is this person's credentials? we sort of just defer to whoever's standing at the front of the room, whoever's leading us, and sometimes we forget to challenge. And I think that you have a trait that is very valuable, which is the willingness to disagree, the willingness to ask tough questions, unpopular times, it's a new environment for you, and you're willing to say, I actually don't disagree with you. And I'm interested in that part, but I'm also interested in the belief that people could be rehabilitated. There's always the sentiment on social media when somebody commits a crime that we need to be tougher on them and that will fix them.

We'll put them away longer than they'll learn their lesson. There's this lack of faith in people sometimes that we have where we don't believe that people can change, that people can get better, that there's resources, that there's tools that we could pull on to help. And so what I see is a willingness to disagree, but also a faith in people in that early stage where you disagreed with your professor. Could you just elaborate on that? Well, I'll just tell you one funny story before we get right into that about disagreeing, because that article I told you about, even though it was a critique of this work, what was called Robert Martinsons, Nothing Works, was a very famous piece of literature. The title of the article for the journal was justifying methodologically inadequate research for criminal justice policy.

So it was sort of a shot at government. for, you know, basing their policies on this inadequate research. But one funny story I had, and you talk about challenging authority, one of the things that happened was I wrote an article once on the need for prisons to have self-sustaining industries. So I had this idea that you could develop work programs inside prisons that could generate, income in and of themselves and help pay for the operations of the prisons. And you could also do it in a manner which would provide funding for individuals once they'll release from prisons.

And it got published in the local newspaper. I didn't send it to them. Somebody did. So the head of corrections for BC at that time came to me and called me up at my office. and said, get over to my office right now. You know, where do you get off talking about this stuff? You know, we're not ready to do this right now. You know, that's it.

You're banned from doing any more research from corrections, and your students aren't going to be doing practicums with CSE anymore. You know, that's it. Get out of my office. So I went back to my office and said, whoa, I'm thinking I did it now. But anyway, two days later, I got a handwritten note from the Solicitor General of Canada saying, you know, I read your article in local newspaper

and I just love it. Great idea. Want to know more about it. So I called up the guy who kicked me out of his office and I said, you know, I know what you said and I heard you but I just want to know that your boss, Bob, was Robert Kaplan at the time. So I said, I think he likes it. He just wrote me a handwritten note saying that He thinks it's pretty good.

And he said, oh, no, I think I've, I just jumped to conclusions there. I should have thought it through more carefully. And so at the end of the day, I ended up doing this big study on self-sustaining prison industries. I said, well, can we give you some funding to do that with a professor from SFU? But another example where, you know, you take risks, and, you know, there's always, when you're trying to introduce something new. You know, as I always told my students, you know, there's nothing I love more than a protester. But remember, if you decide to go down that road, you know, get ready for punishment because people are going to beat you up pretty badly. And that's not a bad thing necessarily, right?

It's the willingness to be challenged is something I think we need more of. My fear with social media is you can join a group where everybody agrees with you. And the part that I found unique about my criminology degree from UF.E is that we would go into the sitting area where the professors, they have their office hours, but they had this desk, and we'd all sit there. And we'd debate everything. What are the contributing factors and what do solutions look like? And we were never on the same page. And that's what I think learning is when you're in that undergraduate degree is being willing to hear opposing views. and some of my best papers were because I could tell that the professor had a preconceived

notion about what the paper should be about what the correct answer is. One I think was like multiculturalism in Canada is like an effective tool or an ineffective tool for addressing like crime in prisons. And whether or not you're willing to disagree with it or not, you're going to step on perhaps the professor's toes on what they think the right answer is. And so that willingness to disagree I felt was particularly. strong in criminology programs. And what I've heard from students in other programs is like, you get a criminology student in your class, they're going to disagree. They're just going to

disagree about everything. They're going to be a troublemaker. Exactly. They're not going to let the class run smoothly because they're willing to speak up and say, I don't think that's true. I don't think that's correct. And I think that's the beauty of the program is not necessarily that you know how the court system works. Of course, you learn that, but you learn how to hear other people and be civil in your disagreements. And I think that that's such an important. tool. Yeah, absolutely. So you were asking about, you know, my teaching. You know, one of the things I felt so lucky for being at UFE, especially in the early years, because we went from a community college and, you know, that was all about, you know, moving heaven and earth to create opportunities for people

who hadn't been to post-secondary, and being very community-oriented, very applied, and then we evolved into, you know, university college and a university. So, but I was always coming from the place that I just love it when students come to the institution, and they're sort of, they're without direction. they're struggling

and to look at each student and say you know, the name of the game here is to get you to love criminology. Now I knew they weren't necessarily crim students but I wanted to at least come to every single class and find it incredibly interesting and be inspired to go on to learn more about lots of different things. That's where that critical perspectives come.

comes in. Like, you know, I'm not somebody who subscribes to what we'd call as, you know, radical criminology, you know, this view that, you know, that all things are shaped by social conditions necessarily. But I still presented that. I would go into class and make out like I was, you know, so far to the left on criminology. And then, you know, later, say to students, well, let me tell you why that wasn't such a smart move, right? There's other perspectives here. I always tell students, look, whatever I say in this class, and you might recall this, I'd say, like, if you, for whatever reason, have to leave this course before the end of the course,

forget everything I ever said, because so much of it is so intertwined throughout the semester. But I always saw my role as a professor as more than anything. inspiring people to love going to school. Once you get there, once they latch on to something that they love, and we've all heard that story so many times before, somebody doesn't do well in math or doesn't do well in science, and then all of a sudden there's something that twigs them, and they become obsessed with it.

It's their life. They eat, sleep, drink, criminology, or sociology or whatever. And then you can see that their talents really shine through. So the name of the game as a professor is to say, I need to find out what is it that's going to excite you and give you an opportunity to maximize on all the potential that you have. So I always thought of every student as like, you're the greatest. You're going to go places.

We just have to figure out where you're going. Yeah, where you're going and how to get there. And it would always bother me if somebody ever dropped out of my class. Like for me, it was devastating. Like, even one student drop out. I'm on the phone saying, you know, like, what's wrong here? Why aren't you here? Because I know how important it is.

Like, I always thought, you know, that it's, whether we're talking to the University of the Fraser Valley or universities anywhere, about 40% of students don't get through the first tier. They drop out for one reason or another. And thinking, how unnecessary is that? Like, that whole matter of student retention should be considered a priority. Like, you come here, you are, you're going to stay here through to a degree. And, you know, that's not hard to do. It's just that you have to have this relentless effort to make it happen. Absolutely.

I think of the people who are the most tough on me as the people who pulled me in to want to do better. examples. I've had John Haidt on the podcast. He got mad at me for almost falling asleep in his classroom. And he was like, you're capable of so much more. What are you doing? Why are you squandering your own potential? Yvonne Danderand is another good example. Unbelievable. Absolutely. Like I would say with Yvonne Dand in particular, I work on a project with right now. We're working on projects together forever. I work with him at the International Center for Criminal Law and criminal justice policy. is housed out at UBC Law School, I regard him as bar none, the single, most knowledgeable, capable criminologist on the entire planet. Like, you know, he's so, as you know,

he's so knowledgeable about so many different things. He does so much international work. And that's no disrespect to my other colleagues at UFE, who are just completely brilliant, John Haidt included. It's just that Yvonne has had this, you know, he's an old guy. He's had more experience. But, you know, yeah, people who get to take courses from these people are just, they're just playing lucky.

And remember with my own son when he started at UFE, you know, he would say to me, yeah, you know, what's the difference? I'm getting bees in my class and he's, you know, that's not going to help you if you want to go to law school. You've got to do better than that. So I went to Yvonne, and I said, Yvonne, Sean, my son's him. I said, Sean, I said, Ivan, you know, I've got to turn him into a serious student here. You know, I'm his dad, and so what do I know, right? So he says, okay, well, I'll think of something.

So he, the next class, he calls my son into his office, and he says, pack your bags are going to Ethiopia. We're working on a U.N. project all my son's in. second year like what what the heck so and all of a sudden instantly he's a serious student uh and i know yvonne used to do that with lots of students you know yeah he did he did that to me he uh one of the papers i had to write for i think it was like policy reform or something like that and uh one of the topics was my interest was um indigenous over representation in the criminal justice system and going through and realizing part of part of

of the desire, part of the, I think the common understanding is that this is racism that ends up with people being overrepresented in the justice system, whether it's in the court system, whether it's in the prisons, that it's

like there's some bad actor, somewhere, and if you just find them, we could resolve all of this. And then discovering that a lot of the crimes are violent in nature. And so they require harsher sentences that are criminal code handles the types of crimes that take place in certain ways, and you can't change that.

And so, of course, there's historic traumas that have contributed to the circumstances indigenous communities find themselves in. But one of the challenges, we can't just release violent offenders. That isn't the solution. And I don't know, perhaps during the early years, it felt like this overrepresentation we could just fix it if we just released the people. and why aren't we just releasing indigenous people to make everything fair? And it's way more complicated.

And so when I wrote the paper, it was basically with the conclusion, there isn't a clear step one, step two, step three, and then we can fix all of this. And he was like, good, you're on the right track, you're understanding how challenging these issues are over time and that there isn't one clear-cut solution, because if there was, we probably would have already done something about it. And so he involved me in the First Nations Court

research and trying to understand that issue and what the proposed solutions are so I can understand what's taking place, but that was an issue that sort of stood out to me, and he found a way for me to get involved in that, just like how you're sort of describing. Yeah. And again, it's always these things, or a collection of these things, which causes somebody to get to a place to say, of course I'm going to do better because I absolutely love this. And when you love it, everything becomes easy. You don't have to tell somebody to read stuff because they're seeking stuff to read. They're paying attention to every nuance of conversations about the subject. And it's just to gain that exercise of getting there and being

as supportive as you possibly can and recognizing that, you know, every student, you know, has a life outside of academia. And for many students, it's just ridiculously difficult challenges. But But when you can get to a place where you can address that and, again, have it interesting, you can fundamentally change people's lives. Like one of the things I had an opportunity to do many years ago, it was over 30 years ago, you know, the government asked us if we would design a program to help women who were on social assistance, single moms who hadn't graduated from school. And so you can imagine, like, and have children.

Like, it was an incredibly difficult situation for them. And so we said, okay, yeah, this sounds fun. You know, we'll take our two-year diploma program and we'll condense it into one year. And the idea was with this program that people would have this incredible readiness to go into the workforce in corrections. So we advertised in the lower mainland that this program was available, and we were seeking candidates. Well, we didn't advertise we're seeking women who were, you know, in social assistance and had all kinds of challenges.

We presented it as though, you know, there's this program opportunity, and we already had people referring these women to us. And so we would interview them and say, you know, yeah, this is highly competitive, this is great, but we love you. You're going to be great. And that was our approach in the beginning. Like, you're a star. You're going to do great. And we started with 30 women and we finished with 30 women. And they all got jobs in the criminal justice. Many of them retired later, you know, went from there to retiring and from their work in criminal justice. justice or the social services system. So it was really an illustration of, for me, it's just another example. I've always believed this, that you know, you can take anyone from where they're at

and cause them to be a better person and cause them to have a better life and have better conditions and have the potential to create all of that on their own. You just need to have, confidence and a belief that people will rise to the occasion. People will do it. And if it doesn't happen, I always saw it and my job as a professor is I'm the one who failed them. Like it's really that that is why you're there. I was just to say too that a brilliant student doesn't need me. They're going to do it on their own. I mean, I can encourage them to go on to get a PhD.

But you always have to be attentive to the student. It was like John Haidt coming to you and saying, Aaron, you're, looks like you're falling asleep in class. Like that's the skill. Like where you say, you know, I am going to make sure that every single student, everyone who struggles, everyone who's not, doesn't write well, whatever, I'm going to, I am going to inspire them to do something that they really want to do. I was just to ask students, too.

I don't know if you remember this if I said it in this class, but I'd say to students, you know, if you could close your eyes and wake up and be in any job you wanted to be, you know, and you know the usual doctor, lawyer, and then I'd say, well, how many would want to be a doctor? Well, half the class put up their hand, want to be a doctor. I'd say, like, imagine that you don't have to go to school. It's all taken care of.

You don't have to worry about the money, I should say. You go to school, but the money's taken care of you, and assume you're in. You want to be a lawyer. You assume you've got accepted all of that. Well, the whole class wants to do one of these great jobs. And why don't they? Because it's so hard to do.

There's so many obstacles to overcome. And for the most part, they don't believe that there's a... Why would even bother go on that road? Because I'm never going to be there. And so, you know, you just have to always have in mind that... You know, if you can, again, create this circumstance. And I don't think it's just for students. I think it's for people in society in general.

When I think of people who are facing adversity, people sometimes ask, you know, like you've asked me before, you know, about I face diversity. Well, I don't really think I've ever faced diversity. I've faced challenges. I've faced unbelievable tragedy. but adversity for me is for people who are facing a circumstance in front of them that they're caught up in, that it's hard to see an improvement, a better outcome. It's like people who are in the Ukraine right now.

I think like, I mean, whatever problems I might have here are nothing compared to what's going on for those people there. You know, wake up one morning and all of a sudden you don't have a house, you don't have a job, you don't have a future, and you're constantly living under fear. That's adversity. Nelson Mandela, that's adversity. People who are homeless, people who have challenges with respect to substance abuse, people who have enormous health issues. Like people talk about, well, you know, one health issue or another, well, I met people when I was an MLA, you know, one particular person is drug that he needed to help his son cost $1 million a year. And if you don't get it, you're going to die.

Like, that's, that is heart-wrenching, adversity, challenge. People who are fighting cancer. I mean, there's so many people and so many walks of life who are, you know, facing one challenge or another. I think another one, of course, is all of the people, you know, who had the residential school experience. And those who weren't in residential schools and suffered through the public school system. People who are discriminated against because of their weight, their height, their physical appearance. You know, we talk about systemic racism. Yes, there's certainly that, but there's basically systemic discrimination,

six ways to Sunday in society. And those people, I'm so, I feel so badly because not only do they have this enormous challenge, it's so commonly difficult for them to go to somebody and get help. I remember that as an MLA. People would come into my office, and they wouldn't be very articulate. kill it. And they have, they've obviously knocked on 100 doors and been told, no, go away. And it would be very easy for me to say as an MLA, well, I'm sorry, there's nothing we could do. That was a common thing. People would do. Nothing we could do. But I never did that

once. Every single time, I thought, whoa, I'm going to kill myself to help you get past this. and then seeing for myself like, gee, I'm here trying to help. I've got the inside track, and it's still difficult. What about for people who are trying to navigate all of that on their own? And then the people who, you know, go through these efforts to self-improvement and at every turn find out the services aren't available. They're not available in a timely kind of way. They're not available in a lasting kind of way.

They're never enough. Like, you know, we keep forgetting that somebody doesn't need just one thing to be different. You need lots of things. And you need lots of support. You need people behind you or support, support, support, support. And then they'll get to a place. And we all know there's stories of inspiring stories everywhere, of people who do this.

all we have to do is say, you know what? Nobody's going to get left behind. We're going to do it with respect to everyone. And if we could have that mindset and have that mindset in government and, you know, in so many ways, like on the drug thing, for example, with the overdose problem,

like we've had more people die from overdoses over the COVID time in British Columbia. than we had more people died of overdoses than died of COVID. Like, I'm thinking, like, what else do you need to know?

You've got a thousand plus people dying a year, year over year. Like, I'm thinking whatever you're doing needs to stop and you need to do something else. Well, is there something else we could do? Oh, yes, there is. And that's been known for a long time.

But people have one reason or another for not moving on it. you know they're they're not like when you think of the times when it was one of the things I was so upset about when I was a liberal I'd be yelling and screaming about well better services for seniors for people in need one man or another and it would just fall on deaf and arrogant ears you know the people just didn't they just didn't care that those aren't our constituents they're not voting and so so you have that mindset and then When somebody comes along, you get a change in government who does have an interest in helping people in need.

You know, they've got a lot of catching up to do. You know, it's not like, you know, they can just say, okay, yeah, we believe there should be housing for these people. Because it hasn't been for 10 years. You know, you're trying to play catch up. And so many of these problems seem to be so fixable to me. Certainly the drug problem is fixable. You can fix that in a nanosecond. How?

What would you do? We give you a magic one. Yes, if I could be the boss for a day, which would never happen. But if I could, I would have a regime of legal drugs. So that you're someone who has a substance abuse problem. go to that building over there. There's doctors there, there, there and they will make sure that you have

the drugs that you need. We're not having safe injection sites because we don't want you going out getting your own drugs, clubbing somebody over the head to get them or getting dirty drugs. We're going to make sure you're provided with prescribed drugs and we're going to make a commitment to you. We're going to say,

we reserve the right to to encourage you to not do drugs because they're not good for you, but we're never going to stop you from using if you want to continue to use until the day you die. So what would that do? Well, number one, it would cause a person to be in a position where they're not out committing crimes. And I think if you talk to many police chiefs, the largest part of property crime, certainly the largest part of organized crime, is related to that drug supply. So we would be saying, in effect, well, no, there are no drug dealers in British Columbia.

There's only one. And that's a government. So goodbye, organized crime. There's no money to be made here because drugs are free. And then, of course, once you have people under that regime, it becomes easier to help them with respect to health services and social services. Because you know where they are, you know who they are. So just to play devil's advocate because I can hear someone sitting there being like, I don't want to pay for somebody else's drug use.

I'm against drugs and I don't want my government. I don't want my elected officials supporting other people doing drugs. And if they want to do that and they want to die from that, they can figure their own way out. So that's obviously just the counterargument. And I would say I couldn't agree with you more. Like I'm like that too. I don't really want to pay for this either. But I don't want to pay for the greater costs.

that are incurred from health care costs, social services costs, the fact that it costs something like $75,000 per person on the downtown east side to be helpful to people who are mental health issues. Or the other thing, of course, we all know that once a person, for many people who are substance abuses, they also have mental health issues. Well, how did they get mental health issues? Well, it's related to the drug use in many cases, not all cases, because sometimes it's in mental health that leads to the drugs.

I would say the cost of health care services is going to outstrip whatever cost there is for those drugs, which, by the way, is about $250 billion, sorry, $250 million that would cost to set up that regime and have it running in British Columbia. And then, of course, the bigger one is if somebody says, you know what, I can virtually eliminate property crime. I can virtually eliminate. Therefore, you should drive down my insurance costs, my home insurance costs. You should be able to drive down the number of police that we have because we don't need as many police.

Like, what do police spend a lot of time doing? What do first responders spend a lot of time doing? What do emergency work spend a lot of time doing? Dealing with people who have substance abuse issues in a very emergency in an emergency situation. So I'm saying, come back and tell me that you don't want to pay the cost when you've done a tally of all of the costs associated with the crime associated with drug use and the evil that's permeated by organized crime. If I can say to you, I can solve these problems and cause organized crime to have no market in this province, then, oh, I'm thinking I might be able to do away with some gang violence. So I might be able to do away with some killings. Yeah, I might be able to, like every time you do a homicide investigation,

it's costing hundreds of thousands, if not sometimes millions of dollars. Okay, so the only other counterpoint to this that I can think of, I had John Haid on, and we talked about the cannabis legalization. And I don't mean to misrepresent him, but he basically thinks that it was a zero-sum game. There was no real big success because the government didn't work with producers who already existed in the community. people who were already using. They didn't really talk to users.

They thought they were smarter than users. So the government, it sounds like, made a bunch of mistakes. They've set out hallmarks on what success was going to look like, and they've basically failed on their own metrics of success. So the fear maybe is that we do this, and the government doesn't do a great job of implementation, and then this doesn't succeed either, but now we have two streams of drugs. Because we haven't eradicated the illegal market of cannabis yet. That was one of the hopes, and we haven't really seen that kind of...

Right. But, you know, one of the things I was jokingly say that, you know, only half-jokingly, that when somebody comes up with an idea how to do something, there'll be a collection of government types, political types. We'll get in a room and say, look, how can we screw this out? I really do believe that there's, you know, they're moving heaven. I was like, we can't have this working. So there's that problem. They'll always find a way to...

screw it up. But I agree with John Haidt. Like when I talk about drugs, I'm talking free drugs. I'm saying you want to use? And I can tell you it's bad for you. I've written a number of articles on the whole business of marijuana use, for example. I've written an article talking about all the medical problems with using marijuana. Like marijuana is not good for you. Cigarettes are bad. Rijuana is worse in terms of its impact on the respiratory system, et cetera. So we're definitely not saying people should use, but the minute that you say that you're selling it, and government says, oh, yeah, we're going to sell this,

we're going to make illegal, but there's going to be a tax and there's going to be a price. And then, of course, you're not going to kill off the illegal market that way because people will continue to buy from their dealer and pay less and not include the tax. So I was always a fan of saying Even when I was doing all my work studies on grow ops And completely against grow ops

If we had a situation we said We don't care You want to grow marijuana Fill your boots You know like do what you got to do Remember it's unhealthy People don't eat rat poison You know because it's bad for them

We've convinced some of that to keep trying to convince people that it's not good. Like, I mean, even though we have a situation today where marijuana is based, where it's legal, it's not like everybody's using it. You know, there still are, you know, people who say, well, you know, it's not for me. Just like not everybody drinks alcohol.

So you say, you know, do your own thing. Don't hurt anybody. But God help you if you do hurt somebody because we are coming after you with full force. You know, if you're somehow found to be a negative, and you're responsible for somebody's illness, injury, or death, you will be, you will face severe consequences. So I think it's in part the way that you do it. You know, we needed to have a situation on the, like moving away from illegal drugs. If we're going to do it akin to how

the government set it up, is to say, this stuff is dirt cheap. But even then, it's a bit of a tricky situation because you can say, well, you can't have it so cheap, where people can then sell it in other places where it's illegal, you know. So again, I come back to, if you had a regime where you said, you want drugs, you know, even including soft drugs, where that building over there, there's the, any, the medical center, which provides that and it's safe use. I've never, for example, been able to understand the safe injection site use. I'm thinking like, this is crazy.

You say to someone, go out there and get your drugs, you know, and you have them illegally, you know, commit crimes to do that, and we are going to help you actually use it. We're going to make sure you can do it safely. Well, there's something fundamentally flawed in that exercise. Because it's unsafe, because you don't know what's in it. It's unsafe, yeah. And the whole exercise of getting it is unsafe for lots of different people and expensive. That's why I say, no more of that nonsense.

Let's just go straight to, I'm going to make sure the drugs you take are safe because it's a prescription drug. So maybe they should be named like medium safe injection sites or like mediocre safe injection sites. because they're not fully safe right now. Well, that's a good way to describe. They're not safe. Now, I'll grant you, you know, under the world that people who propose safe injection sites were living, you know, certainly I can understand what it made sense to them.

It's better than nothing. Better than nothing. But it's still not great. And I'm reminded there's places like in Switzerland, long ago, you know, has established, you know, that you can administer drugs to people, have a program, and it can work. The other thing people forget, too, is, you know, for people who have an addiction, addiction to hard drugs, like the way that works works on the brain,

And the drive, the drive it causes for you to, for those who use to get that next fix, like there's basically going to be nothing that's going to stand in your way. You are going to get that next fix. So you have to overcome that. That's why we have one reason why we have prolific offenders. Why are you a prolific offender? Well, because I need drugs all the time, right? So you can solve that problem in the same breath.

if you can find a way to deal with it. And it's never saying that this is good. You know, like we don't. I mean, sometimes some of the kinds of cancer treatments we give or have given. It's not like they're harmless. I mean, you do it long enough. It's going to kill you, right? So, you know, I think people just have to rejig their thinking.

And also, in their heart, at the very heart of it, be thinking that person who's using didn't just wake up one day and say oh wow I just love to be a heroin addict like man I love this there's no such thing as a heroin addict who says I just love this you know

or people who are addicted to crack you know and they're you know in several months after using crack steady you know they're they become physically unattractive. They have all kinds of health issues. It's not like people love that.

And then you have to track back on. How many construction workers got injured on the job or people who were in car accidents and then got addicted to OxyContin? Thank you, Purdue. You know, fortunately they got sued, I think, into near bankruptcy into the United States.

Unfortunately, that hasn't fully happened in Canada. but you know there's you know that's all part of it people were prescribing them oxy cotton and then that oxy cotton ran out the prescriptions run out and then off you into something else because Purdue isn't coming along and saying oh boy now that I've got you addicted and I'm going to be giving you something that's going to is going to help you get past that and so those people so many people's thousands of people's lives were destroyed by that. Once again, another example of no accountability, right? Yeah. So one of the interesting things is that I find people enjoy once they climb up the ladder, maybe a little bit, that they think that because they've climbed

that ladder a little bit more than somebody else, that they know more, that they've, like when in school we learn about people who are struggling with homelessness, there's something about it that makes us go, well, I'm not homeless, so I didn't make their mistakes. And there's kind of that putting the blame on them and saying, well, I'm not them. And I see the same thing sometimes when I hear people who listen to the podcast and they make a comment and they go, I didn't want to listen to the one with the professor because those people intimidate me and I didn't go to university and I didn't want to be judged. There's this feeling that whoever's up the higher ring is maybe better than you. And if you're higher on the ring, you're better than the people below you.

If I've got an education, I know more so the people who don't have. have an education are beneath me. But something that you've shown really clearly is that you believe everybody has value. You've had an amazing motivational statement a few minutes ago where you were talking about the value of people and just giving them that time, just paying attention to them and saying, whatever you want to do, let's find the way to get you to your dream position in this world. And I think that that's a message that nobody can receive too much. It's so encouraging for us to think that there's somebody who's going to say,

and look at you and say, you have something to contribute, and God, the world would be a better place if you just did if you just figured out what you wanted to do. And I think that that's sometimes what we forget to do with our homeless population is that we go, well, let's get you into treatment center. Let's get you into AA. Let's fix all the problems. But we forget to say, why are you fixing the problems? What do you want to do in this world that would be a value that you could be proud of? Do you want to make art for us? Do you want to start a business? Do you want to become a doctor? What would your life look like if you had that kind of dream journey. I think it's how our legal system set up. And I don't think my law school or maybe our discussions of law do a good job of reminding us that

the law assumes there's something divine about you. It assumes that you're innocent until proven guilty, that you're the cornerstone of the state. It believes in you and that you are unique and important and relevant. And I think in so many ways when we talk about the anxiety rates and the depression rates, it's like we've forgotten that we have so much to offer, whether it's helping the environment, whether it's building up our community, whether it's addressing homeless problems and helping them, it seems like sometimes we forget that we're so important. Where did that philosophy come in for you?

When did you know that regardless of somebody's social status or position, whether they're a single mother, whatever their circumstance, they're. have something to offer because it seems like that's something somewhat rare sometimes that we believe that the person in the grocery store clerk could be a value that they're not just another tool for me to get my groceries. When did that develop or was that always a part of you? Yeah, I think that's because I have thought about that because I look at people around me and I always think like I am absolutely not better in any single way.

than anyone else. What I am, in many cases, is more fortunate. So I look at even while a professor, I never looked at myself, gee, I'm the professor and you're the student. No, no, no, no, no. No, we're both kind of students. We're both, we're always on the same level.

And whenever I see someone who's less fortunate, shall we say, I instantly think to myself, I feel badly that you don't have all the advantages I have. And I think much of it is generated by the kinds of things which generate systemic racism. Like, you know, you can't go to law school unless you get the best grades. We are going to cut down on the number of people who are admitting to medical school.

Well, thank you very much for that. That's why we have one third of British Columbians don't have a doctor. Why can't you have a world where you say, you know what? You want to be a doctor? Take all the courses. Go. And by the way, it's free. And let's see where it lands.

If you pass, then great. And then we would see a very different situation. Like, for you to get into law school is a very competitive exercise. Hardly, there's not many things that are as competitive in terms of academia goes. And then, once you're a lawyer, it's competitive. You have the article laying, you have, you know, the brutal exercise of going through, you know, the first five years of being a lawyer if you wanted to go to a big firm. And it's all this buildup. Like, you know, by the time you get there, well, you're the greatest.

You're one of the select few who got there. And many people, I think, forget that, well, no, I mean, that's, there's lots of other people who could have got there too. There's only difference was opportunity. Because, you know, so many times, you know, at first it seems like it's something else. It seems like, oh, gee, you know, you're not smart enough, you know, physically able enough, you're not whatever. And then once you put the opportunity there, oh, gee, you know, they're able to do all kinds of things. And so I recall seven times I've been over to China teaching at a international police academy there. A friend of mine who was doing lots of work in China arranged for me to do that.

And so I went every year and every year I takes another Canadian and a police officer or somebody. And we would go lecture for a week at this police academy and had an opportunity to learn lots of police and you know on the news you read about chinese police and you say oh man these people are evil brutal uh no uh not like that at all like maybe a bit and the security forces or this the second tier of police but the the police in general number one you you don't become a police officer in china unless you have a university degree you know it's it's a four-year exercise you go to a police academy it's four years and you learn something else too It's not just about how to be a police officer.

But what was remarkable there, your rank, you can be somebody who's a commissioner. And you're the same as somebody who's a constable. You're the same as a recruit. And they'll say it flat out, well, no, the only reason I got these pips on my shoulders is because I have a different job. I have a different role. I am no better than the person next to me. And I thought, what a wonderful, which I think tends to be kind of a Chinese way.

of thinking, like everybody's the same, everybody's equal, you just have a different, you just have a different rule. Or as I would say, like for people who are trying to deal with challenges in their life, they're at a different place in their life. And can we help them get past that, which should always be something as their mind. We are into helping every single person. Like a Marine, we leave nobody behind, everybody's going to be helped, and then find the ways to do it, which is why it so bothers me when I see government spending, you know, untold billions of dollars on one thing or another, and I think, well, gee, you know, that's wonderful, but what about helping all the people who need it now? And always remembering, I'm very mindful of this, is if somebody,

comes and ask for help. Nobody needs my help when they're doing well. They need it when things are really bad. They need it when they don't know that things are bad. Because a lot of it is too, people don't know that it could be better. Like I go back to when I was first starting university again. I've seen this so many times of students. Well, what am I doing here? Well, I don't I'm just trying to get through first year. I'm certainly not thinking I'm ever going to be a professor. And if you surveyed most professors, they'd all tell you the same story. Nobody says, I'm going to university, and one day I'm going to be a professor,

which is such a totally fun job. And I would have no idea what it was even about. I wouldn't know what a professor does. So why would I be thinking I'm going to be a professor? So it's only once you have an opportunity to experience. it. And so many times I call it the killing of experience. Like we do so many things who we say, how can I keep you down? Another bit, which is when you talk about what causes that, is we live in a world where we have teachers and professors who see themselves as gatekeepers.

Like, I'm here to see that you get over the line. I mean, I'm here. I'm here. I'm to see that you made it over the line. I'm going to give you a mark. You either made it or you didn't make it. Rather than say, I'm a gate jumper. Like, my job is to help you jump over whatever gates there are. There is no line, you know. So, like, at one time, I think Stanford had a policy, Stanford University,

that you couldn't fail. And they believe that if you failed, it was the university's fault. Well, duh, of course it is the university's fault, because however unmotivated somebody is, however challenges, there should be mechanisms in place to get past that or don't take their money. I couldn't agree more.

I think that that's one of the beauties is calling people to reach their full potential. It's not an easy thing to do, and it's a question that you can just follow, and it doesn't really have an end. Like when you think, what could I do if I wanted to make a difference? Your day gets busier and busier and busier,

because there's so much you can do. There's so many different ways you can make a difference to the people in your family, to the people in your community, like to addressing problems around the world. There is no end to you making a positive difference. And that's a responsibility. And I think that that's perhaps the part we forget to talk about when we talk about your rights is this idea that those rights, they free you to express yourself freely, to ask tough questions, to communicate however you want.

But with that comes the responsibility to seek truth, to help others succeed in their pursuit of truth. And that truth might be their career and their personal development. But I think there's a part of us that sometimes enjoys thinking we're one tier up from the next person and becoming that gatekeeper of, well, this professor was really mean to me once. And so now I need to be mean to the next set of students. So they know what I went through. And that's sort of the hazing experience that we put people through. because it makes us feel like our experiences were justified.

And it's a struggle that so many people have is that they've faced some sort of challenge and then they want other people to go through it too because it makes them feel valued and that that experience was worthwhile rather than saying, that was nonsense that I was put through that. And I'm not going to make other people go through the nonsense. Right. And that's part I totally get what you're talking about there

because I always say to myself, I'd be hiring new people to be professors. And then, you know, they would start the job and then they would be bragging about how tough they were and how many people failed and just a worldview that I have to be tough it's important and I tough it's important that I put people through this rigorous exercise without remembering that you know no it's not that you want them to be successful you want them to to get A's they will get A's on their own all you have to do is inspire them and to be encouraging so that, you know, and every time

they write a paper, it's not about, oh, let me see what I can find wrong with your paper. Let me tell you how great it was here. I mean, there's certain things I'd do differently. That's what I was talking about when I'd work a paper. And I'd probably have done this differently. But overall, this is fantastic, you know. And then people love that. People feel appreciated.

And I think if we talk about getting to a place where people have more social responsibility, which obviously the world needs more of that, I think part of that comes from helping people who are facing enormous challenges of one kind or another. It doesn't have to be enormous because everybody has challenges. And helping them get past that and see that they got past that, see that they were helped getting past that, and then that in turn causes them. We've seen this over and over again, where somebody gets past some major challenge,

and all of a sudden one of the things they first want to do is help others, and they get it. They do get what it means to go through, you know, something very, very difficult. And I think it's also about setting the bar high. Like I would say, I mean, half-jokingly, but not so half-jokingly, I'd say, PhD. get a PhD. You know, I just said that to my son, you know, like, you know, you can do anything you want with your life after you get a PhD. So what I was meaning was is that, you know, do, just do something really, really well.

So he went off to Cambridge and graduated from a master's degree from Cambridge. And I said, okay, forget the PhD, you know. And then went off to law school. Yeah. I think people need that. I think people need to be expected. more of themselves than they think they can offer because that's part of the encouragement. Like, we think of encouragement as, you're going to do great, have a good day at school.

But encouragement is, you can do so much. And there's this speaker, his name is David Goggins, and he was overweight, he was abused by his family, and he wrote this book. And part of the story is that he decided in his mind that he did this thought exercise of like, if there is a pearly gates, if there is an end, and they have a list of things that they think you did. And, like, God has this, like, we expected you to run a marathon one day, and we expected you to graduate high school, and we've got this list.

He wanted to imagine this world and say, what if I, I want that list to be filled with things they didn't expect me to do. Like, we didn't expect, so he was overrate, he became a Navy SEAL, he climbed all of that, but now he runs, like, 240-mile marathons, and he does ultra-marathons. And he's out there, and he's like, I don't want to. want to be out here today. I don't want to be running. I want to be at home watching TV just like you, but I'm out here running 240 miles because I'm capable. And he's, his legs are destroyed, but he continues to do it just to show that if I can, anyone can and that your mental strength is the

most important part. But that idea that you have an obligation to go live a life, to go exceed and excel in and support your community and get an education and to help others and to use all of this as a tool for others to succeed and to open the door for others and lift others up and that's what a meaningful life looks like looks like it's something that seems like it mostly comes from like religious belief systems that's where i typically hear that idea again like the idea that jesus is a role model is because perhaps he is the person who wanted others to succeed and that didn't take away from him, him supporting his community and helping others. That idea of a role model, within indigenous culture, we have this idea of a generous man,

and he was turned into a red cedar tree because he gave back to his community. He lived this life that set an example for others to follow, and then the red cedar tree gives back to us, and it's very beneficial. It's one of the best types of trees, and it has so many different purposes. And so that idea, I think, is entrenched in belief systems. I'm just interested to know where did this come from? Was this something you just grew up and you always believed people had value? Was this something you landed on and you were like, oh, this is like I'm not better than anyone else?

How did that come about for you? Where did that stand out in your mind? Because it's something that's not true for everyone. No, but I would say, and again, as I alluded to before, I've thought about that because sometimes I think I'm a bit of an oddball. But I'm tempted to say I was born that way. Like I knew that in grade one. you know, helping the kid who is getting picked on, you know, having this, to this day, this complete dislike for bullying of any manner or form, and it just feels good.

But it's not like I'm practicing it. It's not like I'm doing it. I just do it because in my bones, I would not feel good if I didn't do it. That's where it's at. So it's sort of a, It's a very easy thing for me, and it's not even, like, the thing about thinking that I'm in any manner better than anyone else is it's just not even on my radar. Like, I just, it's, it's, it's just the opposite. I go, go about my things and thinking every day, whoa, am I ever a lucky person? I wish you could have what I had. I wish your life was as good as you want it to be. And that doesn't have to be like, you know, I said like, you know, I kid around and tell students because they're in university.

I say, well, you don't get a PhD, right? But I have the utmost respect for people who choose not to do that, not to choose the university route. Like I just love people who are in trades and what they can do. Like, you know, I mean, I'm in terms of, like, carpenters, you know, like I've, to this day, I can't figure out, you know, how they measure much of anything, right? I'm the kind of guy who measures once and has to cut five times, right? But, and I love it that they love what they do, and I love that they take pride in what they do. And it's really honest work where sometimes when you're in a university, maybe your discipline is less rigorous.

maybe there's less a challenge to your discipline, you start to not have that feeling of honest. You did an honest day. Yeah. And I love people who work in janitorial services. We just love the people in janitorial service at the university. Such wonderful people. Everybody who does whatever they do.

One of the things I loved about UFE, we didn't have a faculty association. We had a faculty at staff association. like we're all in this together the only thing that's different about us is you have a different job that was it so I don't

I don't see how I see how it can how we get to a place where people think they're better than others but I think we do it to ourselves again like we keep putting up these barriers we put up these gates and then we boast about people who are over there and over the who have made it to a certain threshold and and then those like with doctors

I think is the best example I shake my head I'm thinking like we have this outrageous shortage of doctors and it's probably a fair comment to say people are dying because we have the shortage of doctors people aren't getting the care they need by a long shot I got an idea, let's take doctors from other countries. Let's get him here. Let's motivate him to come here. Of course, that gets to be a bit tricky, too, because you take them from places where they're disadvantages for their own population.

But there's so many things that we could do. And I would say the other thing you have to say is we need to start holding people accountable for not doing these things. Like, who has the capacity to do that? Well, it's government. It's the medical schools. it's universities, and they will have one excuse or another about why they can't do these things. And we should say, stop the nonsense.

You know, like, tell me about that after you've done this. Tell me about that after we've hired thousands of doctors. And again, I come back to, never mind bringing in doctors some other countries, open the floodgates really wide for medical school. You know, and especially now with the online thing. Like we had so many courses, programs that were online, like law school, for example. Why don't we just say, well, whatever it doesn't make?

Like, you know, let the person into the class and see how they do. And if they make it okay, and if they don't, okay. Like, what's the loss? But, of course, you don't do that because then it affects the prestige. Oh, no, you could never have a situation. You say, anybody gets in. You look at the rankings of universities and how they rank themselves, they're never getting ranked for how many people that they graduate or how well the graduates are doing. It's always about articles written by professors and so-called reputation, which is sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy because does Harvard have a good reputation?

Well, duh, I think it does because it's had one for a long time. and then they get points for that. But in terms of points for student retention, and I suppose you could even try and experiment out where you said, look, you know, what we're going to do is we're just going to randomly pick a bunch of students who have applied to university and we're going to let them into these Ivy League schools

and see where it goes. You don't try stuff like that. It seems like it struggles because we like our egos. And it seems like that's something that you kind of keep in check or don't even have to keep in check. It's just low is this ego because I didn't attend to my graduation at Allard because I don't need that. I don't need to be up in front of people. First of all, there's other people talking for like four and a half hours that are not the students and they're talking about all the differences they've made and their knowledge and expertise and how it's so important to them that the students are graduating even though they don't know who we are. And then we get up for a second. We get our diploma and we go off stage. But the thing I never liked about law school was this ego, this feeling that we're prestigious and now I'm separate or different from other people. And it's because I think that that you miss out on so much once you start to think you're different than other people.

And that's why it interests me so much that you're able to maintain this is because I think where the average Joe feels the biggest egos where they feel like they're dumb and in. inferior is often within the universities. It's the only time where people say, I didn't want to tune into that podcast is because it was a professor, is because there's a level of intimidation I see they feel towards an educated person. Now, granted, every professor I've had on, they've gone, you know what, but that professor Martha Dow, she was great. She was super down to earth and friendly and understanding.

She was a human being. But there's this just idea we have in our mind that the academics think they're better than us. And it's something I did feel when I was at Allard is because we're looking at the cutting edge issue on this legal issue. And I think anybody can sit down and read a legal case. Now, do you understand how a lawyer analyzes a legal case? Maybe not. But it's just words on a piece of paper. And you can read it 10 times if you need to. But you're going to get there over time. And that's what I always try and stress to people is don't think I'm, I have a lens now that I can see things through. But it's not, doesn't make me better. It just gives me an extra tool in

my toolbox to see the world through. And so I just really appreciate the humility that you bring to that position and the inspiration you try and instill in your students. I'm glad you mentioned Martha Dow. She's one of my best friends. And of course, we worked together for quite a few years, two plus decades. Yeah, she's an example of someone who just doesn't have an egotistical bone in her body and is always thinking about how to make things better for students. And again, you know, she has for so many students. Absolutely. So can you tell us about some of the work you've done within the criminal justice system that stood out perhaps to you? Things that you've been involved in so many different projects, it would be tough for me to name them

all off, but projects that stood out to you that meant something, whether it's internationally or local. Yeah. Well, I think overall I did over 200 research projects, but some of them that were just a whole lot of fun was I did the evaluation of the execution and planning for the 2010 games. It was basically evaluating the security for the 2010 Olympics. And just to get that was a fantastic thing. It was an opportunity. I was able to have 20 different students work on that project. That project ended up where one student made a presentation to the prime minister's office. The project was presented at the United Nations conference.

It was also used the report, which was generated, was used in a graduate management program in Brazil and used at Queen's University and was a chapter in a textbook. So it really exemplifies the way I approached all my projects. Like I was the RCMP Research Chair for nine years or whatever it was. And most times a research chair, if you're a research chair in Canada,

well, most everywhere in the world, you have a program of research, we call the program research where, you know, you focus on a very narrow path. You're looking at one or two different things. Well, in my case, I just kept doing what I'd been doing for decades before. When somebody says, well, what do you research? I'd say, well, I don't have a clue. I couldn't tell you what I'm going to do next year. I'm going to be researching whatever comes through that door. A community agency is going to come to me and say, we want to know about this. A student is going to come to me and say, I've got an idea. Wouldn't this be an interesting project? And I'd say,

wow, this is fantastic. And then away we go, we've got a research project. So we would always be doing research projects which have a value to a community agency or a criminal justice agency or a government. And then in the course of doing that, I have these incredible learning opportunities for students, fun opportunities,

and then we end up producing something which is a contribution to the field. Like it's just incredible. Like one project we worked on, was trying to determine the first physical evidence of police officers' stress. So we did these full-shift ride-alongs with officers, whereby it was over 100 officers, I think it was, where we had, in each case,

we had a listing of 120 different activities a police officer does, like open and close your door, recording as many as nine different activities in any given minute. So the student would ride along with the police officer with a full shift. And meanwhile, the officer is also hooked up to a heart monitor. So we could know what was happening with a heart at any single time something happened. That work became a very famous article. It's one of the most read articles in criminology.

It's over 10,000 reads worldwide. I think it's up to 12,000 now. And one of the authors of that article was a student, was this so often the case. The students, it's like, you know, we're not different than you. We're all in this together. Like, if you look at my reports, you know, I hardly have anything, which is single authorship. It's always with a student or a fellow colleague. But so that project, well, ask me if that would be fun for student to do.

I mean, I've had projects where students were flying around in a police helicopter or at, you know, near treetop level, you know, looking for outdoor groves, you know, stuff like that. They, you know, riding in a police car where you're airborne, you know. It was like exciting once in a lifetime kinds of things. And, you know, just did so many of them that were, like, so much of us, the work we did, was saying, well, this is a police practice. how can we evaluate whether or not that's as good as it could be, or should you be doing it at all?

Like one of the projects we did was the whole business of police car chases. And what happens in a police car chase? Well, as a consequence of that, that's what changed the policy. To, you know, police just couldn't willy-nilly say, gee, I see a bad guy getting away, I'm going after them. No, you have to follow a certain procedure. Very strict rules. on police chases because we determined and look we also looked at why do police crash cars

and then as a consequence of that that changed how police parked their cars you'll notice when they park somewhere that even in the detachment or department they back into their spots because so many accidents happen when they're backing out in a hurry or making U-turns so and then a police use of force we did lot of of stuff on that, like what happens when validating is a force, evaluating physical fitness, but just fun studies. And then of course we'd have opportunities where students would go present the work in other countries.

Like one day I was in my office with this one particular student and he had developed a program that we were working on so that a police officer could just simply tap onto his laptop and his or her car and pick out, quickly identify every social service that was available and where it was and what they did in the entire community. It's just at their fingertips. So a police chief from the U.K. happened to be in my office that day who came to visit. And he said, what's this guy doing? I said, well, he's working on this. And he said, well, God, I've got to have that guy come over to the U.K. and do that for us. Well, two weeks later, he's on a plane. And he's over in the U.K. doing the same.

same work for them. Overall, I would say in my work, I visited over 30 countries. So ask me if I was a happy camper with what I was doing. I'm doing the kinds of research projects. And it wasn't just, obviously it wasn't just on policing. You know, that was a lot of it. But it was, I mean, And if I said to somebody of police, you know, I got an idea for a great project, they were going to listen. You know, there would be an opportunity to do it. So that was fantastic.

It was just fantastic. But always thinking, again, everything we do, we're doing this project for you as Abbotsford Police or Vancouver City Police, but not really. We're going to give you what you want, but we really care about policing everywhere in the world. And by the way, want to do it in a manner that's going to be helpful to students. And most every criminal

justice agency was so helpful. And it was kind of hilarious because I only had one, whilst I was never at a time in my career where I wasn't under contract to a federal or provincial or criminal justice agency to do work, I always was. I only once ever signed. a contract before starting it. It was always like this. Hey, Daryl, you know, we need this done. Does that sound good to you? Yeah. Sounds good to me. You know, great. How much money do you have? Because if you have money, I'll take it all. If you have no money, it's free, and here's what I need because I want to do all these things with students. And agencies were fantastic. So, but now, of course, you can't do that. We live in a very different world, you know, very strict rules about all of that.

For the better or worse? Oh, I think in many, I mean, obviously you need to have oversight, but I always argued, well, yeah, great. Oversight, check everything I've done. Don't make me run up all of these hills before I start. And I created, I think it was nine different scholarships from those projects at the university, like endowed scholarships, because I was always a fan of endowed scholarship.

Like, don't just give me money. I want money that I can put into funds so it never, ever goes away. So these things are life long for life. And I would flat out tell the agency, well, yeah, you know, you're paying me to do this project, but I'm spending the money on doing stuff for create scholarships and sending students to international conferences

and whatever else. I don't know what it is, but somebody's going to come and tell me they need something for something, and away we go. Now, of course, the university used to tear their hair out because, you know, I was, always, you know, right on the edge in terms of, you know, how these things went. The proper procedure is like, oh, you should have filled out this form, should have filled

out that form, and I'd say, yeah, absolutely hit me now. And then I can get on to my work, but the way I operated was different because I was never really eligible for a sabbatical, because we structure it by saying, if you want a sabbatical, you need to fill out a bunch of forms to tell people what you're going to work on. for the next year. And if the truth be known, in many places, you know, you fill out the form, but nobody's going back to say,

well, what did you actually do? You told us you were going to do this. But in my case, I wouldn't be eligible because, again, I'd have to say, well, I can't tell you what I'm going to do my work on next year because I'm going to do whatever comes to me from government and police agencies and students, and that's what's going to generate the interest.

And by the way, it'll never be specific on anything because I wouldn't be a good professor if I was doing that. Because as a generalist, what drives me? Whatever, wherever somebody's thinking, whatever a student is thinking, that's what's going to drive the show. And so I always had this bias, too, towards thinking that certainly at the undergrad level, it's important to have professors who might have a specialty. But first and foremost, they're generalists. Like I had one particular course, which I loved, I taught it 105 times. Crim 105, psychological explanations of crime.

Love that. You know, why do people commit crimes, right? From a psychological perspective. But I also taught every other course. Over my career, there was only one course I didn't teach, and that was criminal law. You know, research methods, you name it. Supervised field practicums. And at the graduate level, the same kind of thing.

And I think that's important. against, you can say, and Yvonne and I often talk about this, where we're jacks of all trade, but master of none, right? Like we know lots of, lots of different aspects of criminal justice, criminology, but, you know, we're not ones to be really drilling down forever on one particular topic. Now, of course, you have to do that once you're doing a, you know, literature review on a particular issue with that, but still it's that all over the, all over the map, There's nothing I used to feel more satisfied than when, you know, a student sees their name on a paper and thinking, oh, man, I can't believe this. You know, this is just the greatest.

And again, it's just another thing to tell them that, you know, hey, you're going places. So when I look at where some of the students are today, whoa, I mean, I'm just amazed. Like that one guy I was telling you about who, you know, would develop that computer program. He's now with the RCMP, and he's an intelligence analyst, and, you know, he just got back, I think it was a year and a half ago, from Columbia, where he was working on the, you know, with the drug cartels and that kind of stuff, right? And I'm thinking, like, gee, that's a bit of a ways from Little Dabbittsford, right? But, and so many stories like that where students have gone on to do, you know, totally fun things that they would never in their wildest imagination believed they would get to do. So, yeah. Do you think that the university, as you're perhaps stepping back a little bit, that there are still these motivations?

Of course, there's always going to be the people who want you to follow the policy and check the boxes. But one of my concerns, as I see it develop over time, is that maybe there's less disagreement. Maybe there's a goal that we all more agree now. That's at least what I hear from people who are currently in their undergrads. That there's John Haidt talked briefly about how there's more and more ways to argue a grade and go around the professor rather than sitting down with a professor looking them in their eyes and saying, I think my paper was good here, here and here. Where am I going wrong? That now you can just avoid the professor,

avoid that conversation and go somewhere else to get your issue resolved and that that creates an opportunity for people to get through the system without really facing the real challenges of disagreeing with a professor sort of the way you did in your early years. Do you have any perspectives on we're going in a better direction with education? I know that maybe 30 years ago the professor was a lot more intimidated and hard to get a hold of from what John Haidt said and going to school in the U.S.

is that you really had no relationship with your educator in the U.S. and that's now changed. Now you can sit down and have conversations in office hours and have that relationship. So things are getting better, but things are changing. Do you have any thoughts on how things are developing over time? Well, I never had an appeal. I think I've taught over 5,000 students.

I've never had one. And not often would a student come and complain about or to think they deserve a different grade. But in every single time somebody did, I'm all ears. I'm saying, hey, let's look at this again. Let's see how we can do it. And that was the end of it. And would I change the grade sometimes?

Absolutely. You know, like saying, you know, yeah, you do have a good point there. And always remembering that it's from their perspective as well. So never take a hard line on anyone. I'm not a fan of all of the bureaucracitiation. bureaucratization of things and the whole complaint process exactly because it gets so cumbersome and it's so

lengthy. I'm not sure it's helpful to anyone. It's certainly not in keeping with principles of restorative justice anyway. But then I'm also not a fan of the bureaucracitation of universities in general. Like when I started

at the university, my direct report was to the vice president. And then the press. That was it. You know, like there's none of this, you know, as we have, now you talk about hierarchy in people. You have, you know, faculty, then you have a department head, then you have an associate dean, you have a dean,

and then you have an associate vice president, vice president. I mean, it just goes on and on. And then so people get further and further removed, and people in the administration aren't necessarily driven as universities were meant to be, driven by faculty like it's all more fully administration administrators you know thinking that they have a beat on things you know obviously not saying that that's that's misdirected but faculty clearly do not have the input into decisions that they that they used to have and you know I guess

some of these things it's always the same thing like this is where I have a disagreement on this practice where you punish everyone for the behavior of a few. So all of a sudden we've got this big machine that's to deal with complaints on grades. God knows what that cost, but, you know, it's so laborious when we have a handful of faculty who've done something that they shouldn't have done in terms of marking. Well, I'm saying, hello, figure out a better way. Like, there's got to be a better way to do this than what we have now. But that's so often the way of the world.

Like, you know, with everything nowadays, it's like because somebody does something where somebody's at risk, then let's just beat up on everybody without paying attention to, what, do you really need to do that? You know, isn't it major overreach? But then the other thing, again, is coming back to my thinking about restorative justice. And by the way, I was one of the founding members of Restortive Justice back in 1981. Oh, wow. Yeah, Restortive Justice Association back then.

So I'm a hugest fan of saying, like, let's go informal. Like, let's leave this room with both of us. you know, feeling good about the outcome for the other. Or if not feeling good, at least recognizing that, you know, you're in this situation, you're not leaving this situation where you have as much as you went into it with because then you're not really bending at all towards the other person. So that's off the table.

So but those situations and people who understand restorative justice I said, no, you do. Like, nothing, nothing, nothing works better. It's like magic. Fundamental change in thinking of people who've gone through that process, if it's a serious case of restorative justice. So I say, you know, let's take a lesson from that. Let's do more of that.

Let's do more of that. And you don't have to run people through these, you know, these huge exercises. costly exercises, and they become more legalese, too. There are more and more. People say, well, like in the workplace, well, I'm not going to talk to you. I need a lawyer, you know? Well, no, we can work this out. And after restorative justice fails, great.

Let's do something else. But let's try that first. Yeah, because I see, like, through my time, all the students would dress somewhat semi-professional. They would dress appropriately, jeans. pants that went all the way down to their feet, they would dress appropriately. And then as I was leaving, and as my partner has started her university career, now it's almost all sweatpants. It's almost all very comfortable. And I can see the argument for it. Like, I'm just learning, but to me, there's a beauty in the professionalism. And I appreciate

not only the Yvonne Dandrans, but I appreciate the professors I disagreed with vehemently on their perspective, I'd hear about, oh, this professor, they want you to write the paper in this way, so just write it that way and you'll get the good grade. And I loved those classes because I would go, no, I'm going to disagree, not because I necessarily actually disagree, but I want to see if I can put forward an argument that's convincing that would sway them or move them at all in their, perhaps their preconceived notions or their biases, because that's my learning experience. Can I get someone who disagrees with me to see at least the other side, at least the other perspective.

And to stand up for my principles was that sort of growing experience. And I wouldn't want those people to change. Those were helpful in my personal development. But there were always those students who would go, it's not fair. It's not fair that this person has this perception and they want us to grade that way. And if it's not fair, then it shouldn't be. And it's like, but part of when you're working in a job, you're going to have a coworker that's not fair or a boss that's not going to see things your way.

and what are you just going like there's not a complaint process for every aspect of your life you might have an uncle that's not fair or an aunt that's not fair or um a grandparent that doesn't see you the way you want them to so life is at some point's going to be onerous and challenging and it's how you overcome those challenges that also helps you develop so having these complaint processes that sort of avoid the contact avoid that sitting down process as the initial meeting maybe you don't get anything so But that initial process helps you have to formulate your opinions and why was the person wrong? And that's a part of the – that's what I viewed as the university experience as well, was not only the grade, but how you built relationships with people you agree with, disagree with, and how you kind of navigate that. And it's been one of my favorite parts of the podcast is I have someone who leans left, then I have someone who leans right. How can I get the left person to see the right side and how can I see the right person? See, the left side, because that's my role as maybe the host, is to make sure that at least if they do have their perspective, that it's grounded and they've heard the best arguments that oppose their viewpoints. And I think that that's something that university provides, but they're not always good at telling people that. And same with talking about how many professors are professors, but didn't think they were going to even go to, like, university.

Like John Haidt was like, I didn't see myself ever being a professor graduating university. Here he is as a professor, as you said. So many don't see themselves. That's, I think, the marketing campaign you need is 70% of our professors who are professors today didn't think they were going to be professors ever. Well, that's probably a low estimate, too. Exactly. But that would inspire so many because so many go, I'm not a professor and I'm not an expert in

anything. And so I wouldn't fit in around there. And I bet that professor is going to know that I'm stupid the second I write something down and reminding people that when you're writing something, you're thinking. So often we have a thought in our head or something we heard. but it's not organized like where do you start how do you introduce your point well this is my and like we we kind of teach it as like a technical thing this is your introduction your body paragraphs and your conclusion but that is all the art of communication how are you going to introduce the

point where the reader can see where you're coming from then how are you going what are your points going to be to argue your point and then where are you going to acknowledge where your points are weak how are you going to lay out how you view the world clearly so somebody who doesn't know you is going to understand what you're saying like that I think is often undersold when you're doing like a university advertisement of like, what do you get out of university? You're going to be sharp. You're going to be able to know what your opinions are on something based on the evidence

and you're going to have heard theories on how this all came about and you're going to be a stronger person because when it comes down to something, you're going to be able to articulate yourself, write a paper and write a recommendation that people are going to believe because that person who wrote you that recommendation letter, you said they wrote one sentence? Well, that means they have the confidence of so many that they don't need to say a lot in order for their viewpoint to have value because they've earned that over time. And I think that that's something we need to remember is that some people earn their right to not have to say very much, but to have their viewpoint as credible because they've developed that over time.

Yeah. You're so wise. You should can that. One thing I was thinking about as you were talking about which it reminded me of, you know, know, as you talk about how things have changed at universities, for example, well, one thing that has happened is we've come to demand more of students. Like, it's harder than ever. There's more prerequisites. It's harder to get in. It's harder to pass because there's, you know, more and more there's like, oh, you know, you can only have 10% of people get this grade. And, you know, it's very prescribed. So that's complicated. But the other way in which it's much, more difficult, and I don't think it's helpful to education, per se. And that is requiring people

to do more things to get their grade. Like you give somebody to, you know, five different things in a semester. Well, somebody's taken five courses, and what are you doing this, Mr. Well, I'm writing five papers, I'm writing five midterms, five final exams, and then I'm doing whatever else in between. Like, this is incredibly demanding. If you ask anybody to do that, they're just not, I mean, they're not going to be able to concentrate too much in anything. And their focus is not going to be on digesting and really learning the material, but all I care about is getting the paper done, getting them on. I remember when I went to UBC, one of my first classes in that doctoral program,

a professor wanted us to write four papers for the semester. I just said to, I went to him and I said flat out. I said, there's no way I can write four papers in a semester. I said, my brain doesn't work that way. I said, I tell you what, I'll write one. gets published, you give me a nay, and if it doesn't, you fail me. That was stupid now when I think about it. But I did write a paper, it got published, and he published it with me in an international journal. But it was the thing about, ask me to write a paper, and I have enough time

to do that, I'll make sure I do. I'll be able to do a good job. But if you said to me, write four papers in a short time, that's just not on. And when I think about what, we ask students to do, and I think I couldn't do what we're asking them to do. I couldn't, because it's just too many things and spreading your brain over too many different projects, never really thinking about anyone, forgetting that students don't really read textbooks. I mean, like, oh, it's just garbage to believe that they do. But one of the things I learned very, when I was in grad school at SFU, I had this very famous professor. His name is Leslie Wilkins.

He was head of the Krim program at Cambridge and head of the Krim program at Berkeley. And he just had his BA. He never had a graduate degree. Brilliant. Over a thousand books and articles. And very noted for his teaching. So one day I said to him, I said, well, you know,

what is it that makes you a great teacher? And he said, well, let me tell you a story. He said, I had a graduate student once who had this statistical problem. And he just couldn't figure it out. and it was critical to his dissertation. If he didn't figure it out, he wasn't going to graduate. So he comes to me one Friday and says,

you know, I just can't figure this out. And the professor says to him, you know, why don't you just take the weekend and really think this thing through? Think, think, think. And then I'll see in my office on Monday. So the student shows up on Monday and he's ready to kill himself.

He can't figure this out. And the professor says to him, you know, why don't you do just this, this, and this? And the student looks at him and he's completely released. God, that makes so much sense. It's like, of course, oh, I can't thank you enough. And then the professor says to him, by the way, six weeks ago, I gave a lecture on this very topic. And you were in the class. and the student says to him,

well, that might very well have been, but I didn't have the problem. So, you know, it's that if somebody doesn't have a problem, like, it's not necessarily going to stick in your brain. And something has to stick into your brain seven times before you'll have long-time recall, or any kind of long-time recall. So if we think about this, you're taking five courses,

you've got five things. There's 25 things you've had to do. And we're supposed to believe that you're going to hold them all in your head over the long term? And then, of course, it's not just getting it because you heard it, is because you read it, because you saw it, because you, you know, there's all of these different ways because you wrote it.

And people, all I'm saying is we could do much better in educating people if we said, I'm not going to teach you everything. But I'm going to teach you one thing that you're going to know so well that you're going to say, oh, my God, was that easy? I can't believe how easy it is. So when I used to teach classes, I used to always have that in my mind.

I'm not going to teach everything in the textbook because you're not going to remember that. I'm not going to remember that. We'll just make it a certain number of things. And then it's the way in which you teach it. Like I recall, and I used to teach research methods and telling students, well, You know, okay, well, let's talk about multiple time series designs with non-equivalent dependent variables.

Well, I mean, oh, yeah, that sounds excited. But then I say, I wouldn't, I don't say that. I say, wouldn't it be interesting to know exactly how many lives? If you can nail it even down to the exact number of deaths you could prevent by introducing gun control. How could we do that? Let me show you how we do that. And then you show the students how you can do that and like in a policy, like check the five years before

and the five years after. I mean, that's so easy. I mean, that's dumb. Why are we even taking this? This is so straightforward. And then I tell them, you know, I just told you how to do multiple time series designs with non-equivalent dependent variables, right?

And then all of a sudden they walk around and they're talking about that. And then all of a sudden people think, oh, geez, I can do this. You know, I've read this in the book somewhere. And it all makes sense, but it's how you describe it. It's like when I designed our BA program for CRIM, I never put statistics in the first semester, not even in the second. You didn't do it until you got in the third year.

Because they said, if you tell people that, and they have to take that, they're just going to be, like it used to be standard practice at SFU with the stats, people graduating with their four-year degree program that will be taken first-year stats in fourth year because people just would have such a difficult time with it. So you say, I'm never going to go there. I'm going to wait until you have so much invested in this.

You've already got two years invested. You're going to be more motivated to take that stats class. And then, of course, it's who you take the stats class with too, right? That's a big thing. That's a really good example, though, and I mentioned this before, finding themselves on such a distant memory because so many people take a grade 10 math class with a teacher they don't care about.

Maybe they've got a divorce in their family or stresses at home. Maybe they don't have enough food on the table. And so they're not really focused on that math class. You think of second year university students. They're not really focused on whatever they're doing in that moment in terms of their education. But then people carry that forward all the way until they're 70 years old. I'm not a math person because I took a grade 10 math course and it told me I wasn't good at this. And so I'm not good at it.

And it's like, what an unfortunate way to have to perceive yourself because this institution gave you this taste in your mouth. Like, my partner struggled with, it was a natural sciences course. Like, how does the world, how do volcanoes work and stuff? And she didn't do well on that. The professor or high school teacher didn't pass her in the class. And she's like, yeah, I'm not an earth science person. And it's like, yeah, we're outside on the river. And she's soaking up the river and the trees.

the beauty and trying to understand how like what if mount baker erupted what would that look like and so she's enthralled in it and yet this definition of who she is carries forward and i think that that's probably the worst part of that early education is that it carries so much negativity for so many people that they just got by the grade 12 um english course and they're not an english person yet you think of some of the brilliant writers who have helped us understand the world like people know who shakespeare is but they don't know why he was great They don't understand why Dostyetsky was great or I'm going to mess up his name, Nietzsche.

Yeah. They don't know why these people are brilliant and not comparable to maybe lower class writers or why their writing was unique because Dostoevsky would give you a character that you absolutely despise. He would give you the worst type of person and give you all the reasons why what he was doing was okay. And that's tough for people because we want our evil dictators and our terrible people to be simple and easily to hate and I think the most brilliant thinkers are able to sympathize with the worst people not to allow them, let them off the hook, but to understand where Hitler

was in history, that his people were, they had just lost World War I, there was a sense of that they weren't worth anything, they weren't respected on the world stage, they didn't have a good economy, everything was doing terribly, and then this person, they start to get a group together and they start to tell you all the ways that you're being disenfranchised and how that's wrong and how he can help you get out of that and how you're misunderstood by the general public, the global stage is misunderstanding and that we just need to do a few things and then we'll get a respect back and wouldn't that be great? And so being able to see what was taking place I think is really hard for people because again we like our problem

simple. It's sort of like and I want your thoughts on this. Defund the police. It seems like such a terrible thing from my understanding of criminology, yet you can see it take hold of so many people and there were protests of maybe what would it look like if we got rid of the police? And certain states in the U.S. tried it. They reduced the funding for the police because it was alluring that there was these bad people and they're just in this one spot. And if we just got rid of them, everything would be okay. And so it's easy to fall into these categories because it's so simple. your evil person is this person, your good person is this person, and you don't have to think any further, this is how it is. And so I'm interested in your thoughts on the protests, on the defund the police movement, because from everything I learned, we need to fund the police more.

They're underfunded. They need more resources, more education, more opportunities to develop their understanding of complex social issues, not less time, not less resources. But again, it's one of those easy. We simplify it. We get these two perspectives, and then you just pick aside. Well, I'd say for starters on the defunding police, because I've done a few studies on that, too, and the cost of policing, how it's changed over time. One of the things that's a problem is police are chronically overfunded, and increasingly so.

And part of the reason that's the case is because we increasingly so say to police, we don't just want you to do the job. We want you to do the job in a very specific kind of way. And by the way, when you do that, you're going to add to the cost. So everything they do, like it used to be that to investigate a drug trafficking case would take five steps. Well, then it became 68 steps. And I don't know what it is today.

But, you know, impaired driving used to take an hour, and then it took four hours. Well, why is that the case? Because they're changing the way they do business, all of these procedures. a lot of which is very important because it ensures there's a greater likelihood that a person will experience who's on the receiving end interactive justice or procedural justice. You always want to be mindful of that. But we've gone way beyond that. Like, you know, a police, you know, and anything that happens, every time there's a police shooting,

well, you know, we're going to have a big investigation into that. And what drove all of that in the first place? What drove the defunding? Like, what are people upset about? Well, I think if we track it back into the origins of the defunding route, which I think started in Florida, the people who started were from Florida.

Black Lives Matter was the main driver. It was a result of a number of cases, widely dispersed cases, of police misconduct and police misconduct resulting in injury or death and most notably people who were members of various minority groups

so the George Floyd thing is one of the things which everybody knows about now which really ramped it up there's been cases in the UK there's been cases in Australia and the movement got serious legs because of these incidents and the belief that there's this, you know, George Floyd was abused by police, but people need to know that it's not just George Floyd.

It's every black person has been discriminated again, mistreated. There's a risk of them being killed by police. and police simply refuse to change the way they do business so we shouldn't have them there. And some of this has been pretty startling like the Vancouver Police Board, not wanting to police to show up at mental health calls. You know, that kind of thing.

More and more, they say, no, police, we don't want you to do this, we don't want you to do that. Like, obviously something is terrible. wrong here that's driving this. And people who, I think you have to be, an urgency have to be, you have to be somebody who belongs to a minority group, not just an ethnic minority, a minority group to understand the level of experience that's, a discrimination that's experienced by these people, that it is far greater than is experienced by the average person, by some distance, in every corner. And they've experienced.

at every corner in life. So they interact with police, and police, however, either unknowingly or what, they treat them differently and in a disrespectful way. And then you have cases where somebody says,

I've been abused and I want, I want it dealt with, I want somebody, some accountability. And then the police department moves heaven and earth to say,

we're not going to give you any of that. You know, we're going to lawyer up. We're not going to, you're not going to get at the truth. And then later police are found to be alive. lying about what happened and there wasn't just them, it was the people around them who were lying. And if you're on the receiving end of that, like so many people, so many First Nations people

have experienced that. So many people from the black community have experienced that in the United States or Hispanic community. And the longstanding refusal of police to do something about it, which is significant. And they have so-called tried to do things to change. the situation, like diversifying police, the so-called sensitivity training. Oh, that was just a bunch of garbage, you know. And, you know, one major problem is you have, and I know this because I've done work on

police misconduct. So I have a pretty good idea what percentage of police are, shouldn't even be police officers. And it's probably fair to say it's 5%. So 95% police are wonderful people. 90% are exceptionally nice people, and do their job in the best way possible. So you've got this 5%. Well, they wreak havoc on everything. They cause the cases to be reported in the media.

And then somebody lives vicariously through that media report. So everybody begins to think it's a much bigger problem than it is. Well, it is a big problem. It's a big problem every single time. there's a misuse of police power. So what people are forgetting is that the more you say, well, let's take away their money. No, they're already in a jam. You're already complaining that there's not enough police on the street.

One of the things we know is which improves attitudes towards police is more direct face-to-face interaction in a positive way. Well, the minute you say, I'm taking your money away, you're hurting the ability of police to do that. You're hurting their ability to solve as many crimes, respond to as many calls, to get to as many calls as fast as possible. So no surprise, I think it's fair to say.

Most places where they were talking about defunding the police, somebody said, in short order, oh, I guess that wasn't such a good idea. But what has been a good idea, I think it's called attention, greater attention, much-needed attention, to plain and simple. There are police officers who have treated people beyond horribly. They should not be police officers. And those people should be hustled out of that job as fast as possible.

because it's it's not just a one-off generally. It's like, no, you're a bully. You treat people with disrespect. And as a police officer, you should never treat anyone with disrespect as part of being a police officer. Like, you know, you should be trained to do that. Well, as an aside, they don't train people to do that either.

And so, So we need to rethink how police are trained to respond to critical situation, particularly with people in need, and have it done in a helpful way. Like you think, well, okay, you're a police officer showing up at the scene. Why would you have a situation like you had in Halifax, wherever somebody gets shot? Like, you know, the police are responding to a medical call. and then somebody gets killed.

Like, how does that even happen? And police will always say, increasingly so. We need to be armed up. Yet never know what's going to happen. There's always the one case where the officer could get injured. So, you know, we're not going to have one officer show up. We're going to have ten show up. And then if we've got a tank we can use, we'll use that.

You know, it's always about officer safety. One thing that's interesting, if you listen to reports of police, rarely will you ever hear them talk about public safety. It'll be officer safety. You know, we've got to be protected with the officers. Officers first. And it's really not a good way to present themselves. They should be talking about, no, we're concerned about victims first.

And that's what should be driving it. So the defund movement, we don't want to be ever disrespectful. to Black Lives Matter movement, although I think there's some bad news come out about them in the last couple of days, about early, you know, the spending of the founders and distribution of money. But the principle, in principle,

those who have called attention to systemic racism, we need to listen very hard to them, Although I would say, I'm not so sure systemic racism is the best term. It's more properly described as systemic discrimination. Because for those who have experienced racism, discrimination in the form of racism, there's many, many people who suffer discrimination with the same kind of consequence. And it's got nothing to do with racism. And it's no less discriminatory and of no less consequences.

So I think we might be helped by changing the terminology there a bit. If you can do that without losing, you know, the main point in the first instance. And, you know, there's another organization in society, institution and society, which is, It de facto perpetuates elitism, if you will. And, you know, oh, you can't be a police officer because you don't have these physical attributes or whatever. Well, why is that so? You know, why can't you have somebody

who's physically handicapped be a police officer? Because they can just do a different job. You can be a detective working in the office. You know, you can have all kinds of people, all manner of people, do that. work. They don't all have to be all jacked up, you know, full-blown athletes. And then when you consider, you know, that you have a need, you know, you do need, for example, police who are armed, why can't they do what they do in the UK? Not every police officer is armed. You have

an instance where somebody needs to be, you know, it's a high risk, take down. situation will you call up the unit that does that but you don't need every officer walking around presenting themselves in a way which is inherently it's inherently discriminatory or I'm a better than you kind of mindset or I'm aggressive like police officers commonly put their hands on their vest like on their sleeves this is not a welcoming stance their hand on their revolver. This is not a welcoming stance. Standing with your feet apart, your arms crossed, and talking down to people. That's why so many people, most Canadians, have a negative view of

police in so many respects. Did you know, for example, the most recent survey of the RCMP, showed that 61% of Canadians, only 61% believe RCMP officers are honest. So in other words, we've got 39% of people out there who don't believe to honest. Only 48% of Canadians believe that police treat minorities or indigenous people with, with respect, treat women with respect. I think it's 42% with respect to women. Like, can you think that kind of rating,

that has got to tell us that people have a very dim view of police officers. And that dim view has basically stayed steady, you know, for the last 30 years or worsened. And then police will say, oh, we've done our surveys of the public and they think we're doing a very good job. Yeah, if you're asking them the question, do you think police do a good job of solving crime or that sort of thing, stuff which the public, in effect, would know nothing about because they're not privy to what's really going on in terms of efforts to do that. But once you start drilling down and asking people, Canadians, their views on how police treat people, then it gets very ugly. And then you wonder what drove the defunding movement? It's precisely that.

It's like, how did you treat me? It's not about the outcome. It's not about the instance. Did you treat me with respect? And the greater that answer is no, the greater likelihood you're going to have that people aren't going to be helpful to police and not going to have confidence in the police

and they're going to start saying things like, well, why should I give you money? people look at their local tax bill they'll find that the single biggest charge on there is policing services and again I would say

I get why we would not want to defund the police but I can certainly get why we would say I don't want you showing up at these events. I don't want you showing up it. I don't want you to

show up somewhere where we're expected it to be helpful to somebody. I mean, that sounds horrible, but because somebody could get hurt. And that's what people are saying, which is an awful thing. How did police ever get to that point that, you know,

you have so many people thinking that way? Yeah, and you sit in a classroom filled with criminology students, many of which want to go on and help and give back and protect their community and set a good example, and it's the thing that worries me the most

when we talk about defund the police is because there was a good podcast, I think, with Joe Rogan where he was interviewing someone from the Innocence Project and he was talking about how the challenge for police officers is that when you're in the military, you go somewhere, you know you're in maybe a war-torn country. You can expect, you have expectations that things are going to maybe get out of hand. But when you're a police officer, every call could get out of hand or it could be peaceful. And so you have this fight or flight and this always ready to go. And then you've got the four on, four off shift that depletes you. And then you're always ready and you're always tired. And that's why I wanted to sit down with Councillor Bud Mercer and talk about what those ebbs and flows look like as a police officer.

Because you're always doing your best. Like he talks about how hard he tried to work as a police officer to be the person that was going to catch the bad guy, protect the community and make sure things were good. But then you get a news article from Halifax that says the RCMP are terrible and what they're doing wrong. And then a local journalist here goes, what are your comments on what's going on in Halifax? And it's like, well, I actually just last night did like saved a family from this. And that's not the news story. And that's not what they want to hear about because it doesn't make maybe their headlines. And so that us versus them mentality is the thing that always concerns me the most is because it's easy to, again, hate on the police for that.

5%. It's easy to point at their flaws because the Robert Jekanskies, we remember them. They're easy to recall. It's tough to recall all the calls that went perfectly fine and where nothing happened. One of the proposed solutions that Surrey is looking into very curiously is municipal policing. Bud Mercer laid out a brilliant, all the tenants that I've heard in favor of keeping the RCMP, the benefits of it. But Abbotsford has municipal policing, more police departments are interested in it. Some have declined based on their findings. I'm just interested in your thoughts. Is this perhaps a way out, at least of having police officers that are from Ontario serving our community? And they're like, I just want to get

back to Ontario, so I'm not going to invest in the community. Do you see municipal policing as a way out of some of these disconnects for community members who feel disenfranchised? Do you think that this is a tenable solution to some of the problems we've just discussed? Well, I think in one sense, the first thing again we want to remember is if you're saying, well, am I getting a better police officer one way or the other? No, you know, again, when we talk about problems in policing and the gong show that ends up on the news, it's really that small group of people. And the 95% of police officers who are doing an extraordinary job, put themselves in hard. harm's way. Thank goodness they're there. Thank goodness they're the police officers. They never see the light a day in terms of news stories, right? So in part, I think the police themselves

need to do a better job of that. They need to have a media presentation which talks about all the good things police do. And it shouldn't be as they have a tendency to do, is talk about how they've, they're catching a bad guy because there's a lot more to police work than catching bad guys they could do that but in terms of you said well gee now Surrey's got a municipal force

well I remind people that a significant number of those officers are former RCMP officers so let's get that out of the way you know the managers they have of Surrey police are wonderful I'm also reminded they also have come from the RCMB

in part at least, right? One of their deputies is directly from the RCMP. Their chief is former municipal officer and manager, an Edmonton police manager, and then an assistant commissioner for the RCMP, and then over to transit. So the leadership is, you know, mixed. I mean, in both, whether you're talking RCMP or municipal, You know, they have wonderful leaders.

Well, you've met Bud Mercer. I mean, again, these are some of the most wonderful people I know are police leaders. But so I'm, where I think it makes a difference, and we might want to wonder to what extent some of this is politically driven, but there is a collection of people who believe we should have a provincial force. And this is one more step towards that. I think there's many people, including Justice Retard Supreme Court Judge Wallyopal, who did his report and some years ago and talked about the need for regional policing at least.

So will it be any different in the end? I think from my perspective, the only way it's going to be really different, certainly not going to change the cost because it hasn't changed the cost to anywhere else you know the only thing it would do is we have

bureaucrats in Ottawa and some police bureaucrats in Ottawa who don't pay as much attention to what it's happening in British Columbia as they should some people would say and sort of would tell the

the province to pound sand on certain things we're going to do this is the rcmp way so that's why we're going to do it and you know get with the program um not being as respectful as they should to you know the the differences that might exist in british columbia compared to elsewhere in canada so that is the number one complaint i hear from people in policing is you know when they talk about what they dislike about the rcm it's the way they do business driven by national policy. And, but other than that, it's not like, you know, somebody says, oh, my God, you're an

RCMP officer, you're a lesser officer. Or a better one, that doesn't work. I mean, there's so many joint force operations as well. And no police officer deserves to hear that. I mean, they're all good, other than that 5% again. Absolutely. So the reason I set up interviews the way I do is because I think that it's important that we humble ourselves to your expertise, your years of service. And I think it's the mistake I maybe

saw in your previous interviews is that we lock on to the issue of the day and we forget that you have a background. You've looked into corruption issues. You're a criminologist. You're interested in policies and making sure people the bad actors are held accountable. There's a logic and there's an understanding of the literature on how things should operate to prevent that 5% from getting away with what they do, that is so easily forgotten. You chose to run for an MLA position, a member of the Legislative Assembly, and you chose to do that. First, I'd like to know, how did you go about, you're a very balanced person, you're interested in the services we provide community members, which is typically a more liberal left-leaning stance, yet you want money spent properly,

which is typically a conservative perspective. What was the process? to choose the BC Liberal Party versus the NDP. Was that a challenge? What was that initial decision sort of to run for office like? Yeah. Well, you know, I wouldn't have done it at all if I was thinking properly. You know, I was on a board for a local community group, and we wanted to, you know, build a new child development center.

So, you know, I was a member of the board, a foundation board, and we're about to begin this big multi-million dollar fundraising exercise and I said, well, maybe I can short-circuit that for you because I know somebody in government, you know, Solicitor General because I'm talking to those people in my work and see if I can get the money. So I hustle off to his office in Langley and say, you know, here's the situation we need $10 million.

And he says, well, I'll give you the money, but you've got to go back and get a letter from the city saying that they'll provide the land. So literally within a week, I went back and got a letter from the mayor and all city councilors signed it and went back to him and said, here's my letter, where's my cash?

And he said, well, no, I'm sorry, it doesn't work that way. Have you ever thought of running for politics? My exact words were to him, yeah, when hell freezes over. Like, why would I do that? Like I have, and whether it was two or not,

I believed I had the single best job in the world. Like, nobody tells professors what to do. You know, it's like you do your own thing. You have so much freedom. I love my job. I didn't just love being a professor. Like, it was way past love my job. And I love the people I worked with.

They were just incredible people, fun people. Everybody worked in the institution. And when I say that, you'd be very hard pressed to find somebody who worked at. at UFE, particularly in, you know, when I was there 10 years ago and back, who didn't just incredibly love it. We're pinching themselves. Like, how did I end up here? So, so I love that, and I'm making a fortune because I'm a research chair.

I'm making almost twice as much as a normal professor. Research chairs get paid a lot of money. And I'm doing police work, and I have access to police information. which was more freedom than anyone on the planet. Like, it was incredible. Like, nothing could be better. Love it, love it, love it. So why on earth would I do this stupid thing of going into politics?

Well, for starters, and it's not like I liked, had a particular love for politicians anyway. I won't include people at the municipal level because I think it's a very different kind of thing. But at a provincial and federal level, it was always uncomfortable around politicians. In fact, whenever one came to talk at a conference, I would immediately leave them and say, well, what's going to come out of their mouth? That's going to be anything I can learn anything from.

It's all scripted. So anyway, I'm trying to get out of running. I don't want to run. But I'm also thinking, I don't run. I'm not getting our $10 million. Right? So I went back to John Van Dongen, who was a member of the Legislative Assembly from my area at the time. He was the liberal candidate until the party said, he said to the party, no, I can't stand you anymore.

Or as he put it, Darryl, you have no idea how corrupt these people are. Like he was just so fed up with it. So I was trying to convince him to go back to the party. Fall on your sword, go back and run, and I'll help you run. and you know you'll win because he was a very popular guy and I said John I don't want to do this because if I do

and I'm running against you I'll win not because I'm any better at the job or would be any better or any more desired is just that this is a liberal stronghold and you're not going to be a liberal

so I literally spent 10 hours with John and you know he's my friend but we're going to be opponents. And I'm begging him to run instead of me. And he just wouldn't kick. He just kept saying,

you have no idea how corrupt these people are. Well, I should have listened to him more. So anyway, so that failed. So then I went to John Martin, you know, one of my colleagues, fellow professors. And I always knew he loved politics. And he ultimately wanted to run. He actually ran in a previous election.

And I said, John, you got to run. You know, this time you're going to win. And so I convince him to run. I go back to the party and say, hey, look, when I say party, I mean, basically, I wasn't a member of the party, had nothing to do with the party, it had nothing to do with any party ever. But so I convinced John he should run. And then I'm thinking, oh, God, I'm out of this. This is great.

And then John says to me, remember, you've already. had a good life. You have, you are so advantaged. You have all of these things. You're always whining and sniveling about government. You know how you need to change this change. You have to do it, you know. You don't want to die and say you should have, could avoid it. You have a social responsibility to do it. I love that. Yeah. It was great. It was awesome. And so what am I going to say to that? So I went home and told my wife and she said, well, if that's what you want to do, then do it. So then I made the decision to do it. So I'm given my very first speech, if you will, and it's at the nomination meeting. And I started talking about how nice the

NDP was. I love the NDP. I just don't like the way they spend money, the way they manage money. beef. And so I'm hoping that the liberals can do all those nice things the NDP does, but manage the money better. That was my, well, man, did I get beaten up over that? Don't you ever say anything nice about the NDP ever again? So that's how naive I was. And so, and then I started on this four-year journey. I got elected. So was it, sorry, was it hard to run? Was it hard to bud, Mercer talked about his decision to run in city council. And previously, you have people come to you.

They say, we want to do this research project. We want to get involved in this. We see an opportunity here where, and you get to talk about your students and how you're raising them up. And he talked about how as a police, you're a team, you're working together. And so one of the challenges he said he found was selling himself to people and having to be like, I did this. I was a police officer because his comfort zone is the team.

team, we had a great team, and we did this together, and we made this difference. Was that running process challenging for you, to have to sell yourself to the community, to explain what you were going to do differently, how you were going to make an impact? Was that a challenge, or was that an easy kind of groove to fall into? Well, it was horrible because, number one, you don't like to talk about yourself. That's like, and I appreciate what I'm saying there. And I come from the world of academia. And in the world of academia, you know, there's an expectation. If you have a disagreement with somebody, you're still going to be nice to them. You're going to, you're not, you're going to acknowledge that you're not totally right and that they're totally wrong. You're

just going to have a conversation about it. Well, that's just not on in politics. The name of the game is trash the other person, trash anybody who doesn't agree with you. And I really do mean that. It's like they're the enemy and destroy them at every opportunity you can destroy people who you have any disagreement. I can remember once I was on the children, a family and youth committee for government. It's an all-party committee. And Mary Ellen Trappell, who you might, you know, BBC, she was the youth and child advocate. And she presented this report to the committee on the sorry state of affairs with the U.S. respect to mental health and youth. And I just said to her flat out as a committee member said,

you know, I can't think enough for your work. You know, you couldn't be more right. You know, we need to do more. And when that committee meeting ended, I walked to the door. I didn't even finish turning the handle to leave the room. And I get a call from one that I call them henchmen in the liberal party who said, did you say what we thought you said in there? Did you say something nice of about that, I won't say, I'll just say, that woman. They called her something else. Did you say that? And I said, well, did I say something that wasn't true?

And they said, we don't give a damn whether it's true or not. Don't you ever say anything nice about her, ever? And then I'm, I think, okay, well, I guess I'll get punished for that. And then I'm walking down the hall a couple steps when I get a call from the Premier's office telling me the same thing, how dare you say something nice about that woman. and I'm thinking now let me get this straight she's nonpartisan she's just trying

to do her job she's appointed by government I'm a member of a committee which is supposed to impartially take this information and digest it and ultimately write a report on it and that's what they do

anybody who disagrees with the opposite side if people only knew the half of it And see, that story, people wouldn't normally know. But that is exactly the way they are. I can remember being in meetings. We had meetings on the whole, I was because I was on the health committee.

And we dealt with the whole thing of made, you know, people's right to die or have assistance while dying. Well, you know, of course I'm thinking, well, you know, this sounds like a good idea to me. but that definitely wasn't the view of the liberal party. In fact, they said in meetings behind closed doors, more than one cabinet minister said, to hell with the Supreme Court of Canada. We don't care what the Supreme Court of Canada does. We don't want to do this, stall this thing.

And if people check back on the records on the legislature, that report from when we finished it until it was presented in the house was stalled. And I'm thinking like, okay, what am I missing here? You're a legislator. Never mind that, you're cabinet ministers, and you're telling the Supreme Court of Canada to go to hell. Like, where do you get off doing that? It's that kind of stuff that people aren't privy to. Did you find that we in BC, we live in a weird place because the liberals are our right-leaning party.

And, again, federally, they're considered the left-leaning party. And so there's a little – there's a bit of inconsistency. with how the party is set up, but philosophically, very confusing, because typically they, right-leaning people want government out of your life, out of your personal decisions. That's typically what we think of when we think of, currently Pierre Polyev is talking about freedom, and he's saying, I'm going to get out of your medical decisions, I'm going to get out of your life, I'm going to get the federal government out of your, and whether or not that's true or not, we can debate that all day, but that's the philosophical argument he's making. And so I'm just confused because it seems like they want their cake and eat it too, particularly in the BC liberals when they talk about this get out of your life, but then they want to be involved in the decision making about your decision to die or your decision to do drugs.

Well, yeah, and I would say, though, that it's a matter of wanting to manipulate your life or doing things that hope ever unintended result in a manipulation. Like you will recall, you know, the band for the grizzly bear hunting. You know, it's basically, you know, we don't want people killing grizzly bears, right? Well, that would seem to be a no-brainer. I mean, most everywhere in the world, duh, you know, you don't kill innocent animals. We're certainly not into trophy hunting, right? Some Texan comes up here, you know, and wanting to kill bears that can cut its head off and put it on a wall,

somewhere, it's just a non-starter. So I was incredibly opposed to these trophy hunting. I wanted this stop, I wanted this ban in place. And I couldn't get anybody to listen to me. I couldn't get anybody in the party to listen to me. And I'm thinking, well, what am I missing here? Like, you know, you got 95% of British Columbians were in favor of a ban, and you still don't do it. Well, then I finally, someone reminds me that there's two things.

Number one, who are these people who, you know, go to these hunting lodges and are guided by these people? Well, they're all members of the Liberal Party, and itching to be members of the Conservative Party provincially. So there's a vest that the hotels they stay at, the money they make, you know, that would put all of them essentially out of business as far as that hunting goes. And then you have a situation where this is the more important thing. Somebody says, well, we can't do this because those people who are into this hunting will defect to the provincial conservatives and take seats away from us. Even though, so you know that it's not the majority of people, all you care about is seats in the north and not losing seats in the north.

So you say, well, I risk being out of government. we risk losing the next election because some of our seats are going to a handful of conservatives. So it's a really interesting way to look at how things are done and to heck with democracy and the view of everyone. Constituents. Yeah, constituents. Like, who cares about what people down here think? It's all about, you know, what we're concerned is our political hide.

But it's consistent with what I experienced. I would have to say, I don't recall ever seeing a decision made, ever, where it wasn't for a political reason. Like, that's it. Like, if somebody does the right thing, thank you very much for that accident. But generally speaking, people are making decisions,

always thinking, well, what's in it for us? And I can remember some really horrible ones, like where it was not making a decision. Like, I can recall the situation where I was asked as a parliamentary secretary to health to do a report on seniors. And I did and came to the conclusion that we needed an injection of $650 million to correct this bad state of affairs with the treatment of seniors in residential care.

Well, I can't take credit for coming up with that recommendation, even though technically I did. It was health professionals that decided that. It was people within the health ministry that basically put it all together and did the report and I was just sort of leading it, if you will. So I finished the report. I presented it to the Premier's office and they said, I said, we need $650 million. So we're not doing that.

They said, we're not doing that. Why would we do that? These are old people in the residential care. They can't get to the polls anyway. And then people wonder why I became so disgusted with the liberals and the leadership of the liberals like over and over and over again

that caring less about people and only paying attention to well let's see how many votes is that you know sort of mindset so anything but be of service to British Columbians and some of the decisions they made like

on the BC Hydro purchase of you know they created a story and we'll be clear about that. They created a story that we were in desperate need of power despite the fact that the professionals within hydro and the ministry were saying, no, that is not true.

But once they created that story, it generated a need to seek out power and then they sought out power from 19 independent power suppliers in British Columbia at a cost of $20 billion, not $20,000, $20 billion. That cost you and I and every other citizen $4,000 for that decision. For power we did not need. And then you can say, well, gee, I wonder who owns those companies,

you know, all of that kind of stuff. And you look at it and you say, I don't like that. this is this just is a horrible way to do business and you're not fit to govern this province. You shouldn't be governed this province. And so after I was in, and I won't give you all of the experiences I had. I wanted to say that generally there's certain main things that was just appalling to me. I was never allowed to consider to criticize my own government in or outside publicly because they always had a punishment inside.

Like people say you go to caucus meetings and you've heard that that's where people debate things and you think, well, that's great. I'll go there and say my bet. And if I lose, you know, I'll go with the majority. Well, I never saw one of those in four years. It was always, we've got a caucus meeting. It's going to be filled up by and large

with cabinet ministers or other assigned spokesperson to talk about one issue or another. And you as an MLA can be one of the people, people who in the last 10 minutes of the meeting can express a concern about one thing or another. And it was always the same. The caucus chair would say, yeah, who's got a point? And the person would say their concern and they'd say, thank you very much next. Like, it wasn't as though things were discussed. And so there was no real opportunity. And I always looked at it and said, you know, what they're really doing here is they just want to identify the people

who they have to be concerned about so they can watch out for them. And when I criticize the government about the way they treated people in need, which is one of the reasons why the liberals lost the election, they just beat me up for it. They assigned me to the worst seat in the house. They said, that's it. You know, you're done, man. You're sitting way at the back.

And then later, when I finally said, I'm not putting up with this anymore, I'm going to tell the premier what I think. I'm going to tell her, I don't think she should be, she should be premier. Yeah. We need a new leader. And so I stood up on a caucus meeting and said just that. I said, as far as I'm concerned, either you go or I go. Can you elaborate on that decision process?

That would have been, most people could never do that. Most people can never put themselves in that position. It's almost like they set up the system to knock you down just enough so you learn your place. Oh, but that was going on anyway. I could give you a hundred stories. I mean, have you ever seen this show House of Cards? Yes.

Well, I always likened it to, I was on the job for two years, this name in L.A., and I said to myself, oh my God, whoever wrote House of Cards had to have been from B.C. Because this is so, the only difference is I haven't seen them kill anyone. But in terms of the manipulation,

all of that kind of stuff, it was like House of Cards on steroids. So was it tough to go, did you have a plan in place of speaking up, or did it just come to you in that moment? Because I think that that's a huge example of bravery, of courage, of taking control over what you can take control of. You can't change who the premier is. Maybe you contributed to that. But most people don't have that confidence. They could be that change.

Well, I used to, you know, I was always in trouble. Let's just put it that way. Like, I was always in trouble for speaking up. Like, one time I went ballistic. because a person who ultimately got caught lying to the minister of health and he lied to me at the same time but he came and scolded me because I wanted to push this issue and he said let it go all people want to do is be heard

people are heard and then in five days it's going to go away anyway and I thought whoa did you just hit a nerve with me number one people never deserve that line all you want to do is be hurt no you don't you want action you're not talking to yourself

or talking for nothing but you'll hear that all the time people just want to be hurt garbage anyone who says that should be walked off the property as we've seen happen so you have that situation

where that's their mindset like all I care about this as long as I make it feel good I make you feel like you're hurt you know. As I say, the worst thing that can ever happen to you is if a politician comes up to you and says, you know what, Erin, I couldn't agree with you more. And I'm going to see that we do something about it. I'm going to take that back to my colleagues and we're going to work on that. Like, what a big fat lie. And then, so there's that. And then there was the scripting, like nonstop scripting of everything. Like, I couldn't get anything out of my mouth. And they had somebody who had check it against delivery. So, like, I'd be asked to say stuff, and I'm thinking, there's no way I can say this. Now, fortunately, one of the guys who was of the writers,

he knew what I was like. And so he would always try and be as least critical as possible. But they wanted me to stand up in the house and trash the NDP at every turn, just trash them. And I'm thinking like it's... In fact, one day, I'm sitting in the house, and somebody walks up to me and drops, comes up from behind me,

and gives me a 30-page speech to read. and so I'm looking and I said when do you want to deliver it? They said like right now so I had to stand up and deliver this and so I'm reading it and there's stuff in there that's critical of the NDP well this one when I did this the NDP members all looked at me their head went up when I said some credit and they said

Daryl that's not you you would never say that David Eby stands up and says or you know that is you know that's just not that's just not academic that's just not professional And they were so right because that isn't the way we talk. But for them, trash, trash, trash, trash. And then there was also the way they treat each other in the house, like women being discriminated against in the house.

I complained about this to the deputy clerk. In fact, I mentioned in the house once, like, you know, there's this. There is the way you behave. Whoever unattended, you're disrespectful towards women. And so then Sonia first now, a member of the Green Party stands up and says the same thing. You know, yeah, it's a discrimination. It was pretty obvious.

People were discriminating. What happened on that? What would you think most people do it? Well, you know, we should really try and improve things here. We should make sure we don't do that again. Not the liberals. They collectively wrote a letter to her, trashing her. How dare you stand up and say something like that?

There's just crazy stuff. But that's the way they work. It's like you disagree with us. We're coming after you. that is that is atrocious the role i view um i like this guy navel ravicant he's a sort of a philosopher but he's also done incredibly well with investments and being an angel investor and he's invested in things like facebook and they've exploded and he's done incredibly well for himself but he's managed not to fall in love with the prestige or thinking that he's an expert investor and he knows better

than everybody else he's kept that humility and he talks about our journey in life and how first you're a youth and you should absorb all the knowledge you can and don't feel like you need to finish the book, but read many books. He talks about how then you become like a tradesperson and you work and you are maybe a landscaper or you're an electrician or a plumber and you sort of build your ability to do things and then you go to school, you educate yourself, you develop yourself as a thinker. And then later in your life you move into the role of being a politician. Personally, this is highly unlikely. It's definitely a pipe dream, but I view the role of the politician as somebody who doesn't get paid, as somebody who does it because their community

needs them to lead the community in a healthy way. And I know we're far from that system. But my viewpoint is that politics should be a role that you've called to because other people believe that you can make a positive difference, that you can improve the circumstances for many and that you have the wisdom and experiences to make a positive difference. That's sort of, I think you can go into politics earlier in your life, but that's why I lean towards having that breadth of knowledge because when I was 17, I believed the NDP was all correct. Later in my life, I believe that both parties play a role

and that there's certain times right now we're heading into a recession. Inflation is bad. We need strong fiscal responsibility. We need to be careful, not because that impacts somebody else, but because inflation impacts indigenous communities, people in poverty. That's what my taxation of corporations law textbook says. It impacts those that have the least amount of money because their spending power is the worst.

And so people on social assistants are about to be detrimentally impacted by the design of our system. And in the early phases, we look at someone like Justin Trudeau and we say, what brilliant spending, he's going to, maybe we'll bring in mandatory minimum wages, we'll improve everybody's circumstances, but then inflation shows up. And I think some people forget that the spending impacts inflation, that there's a relationship between the two. And it doesn't happen the next day, which is why we sort of forget why it's going on. And the average person isn't keeping up with fiscal spending or how that's relevant to their day to day, but it reduces your spending power.

And so I think that there's a role for both parties. I don't want to commit to one or the other. I appreciate your perspective that both have like a role to play. But I'm just interested in your thoughts on the role of politicians because through almost all of your interviews, you talk about how they're stewards for the community, that they have a responsibility to their constituents. And it seems like that's not said enough. And that the individuals, the voters, that they're responsible for their politicians, that they owe a debt to the people putting them into those positions. And you had another quote that politicians don't get elected on what they know, on what the people know, they get elected on what people don't know. And I like that. It's sad, but I like that because it's how most people feel.

It's how the, why the average person doesn't vote is because they feel like their vote doesn't matter, that things are just going to go on business as usual. And there's all these pessimistic viewpoints about voting. And I try and encourage people to think bigger, you vote with your money. And so why not vote as well? You vote every day with whether or not you shop Amazon or you shop at your local business. That's a vote you're making. And Amazon absolutely notices when you choose not to shop with them. They're tracking your spending every day on whether or not they can get you to buy another product,

on whether or not you're going to spend something else or they can add on a product. They care about that. So I'm just interested in your thoughts on the role of politicians. Well, you know, when I became, you know, after I was in this meeting where I called out the premen and say, lucky you go, or I go, and then she retired, you know, resigned the next day. And then, of course, I got punished for that as well, right? You know, so I was moved to the other side of the house, but in also a far seat. But then I had an opportunity to become speaker, right out of the blue, you know, somebody from the Green Party, well, Andrew Weaver, who, by the way, is a fantastic person.

Great elected official. And he called me up and said, you know, you'd be great as speaker. And I said, well, this is somebody asked me to do it. I wouldn't say no. Well, then a couple days later, I got a call from the NDP

from Mike Barnes was saying, we'd like you to be speaker. That's all he said. What's the role of speaker for people who might not know? What is that kind of role in the? Well, the speaker is the person who oversees oversees the entire administrative side of the legislature.

You're ultimately technically responsible for the entire budget of the legislature, security for the legislature, and you're also responsible for presiding over the House. So you, just like a judge would do and hearing debates from both sides. So you moderate those debates, you make sure people are following the rules. and if people aren't following the rules, then you call them on it. And then you also, as a third responsibility, you're expected to greet dignitaries who come to the ledge.

When I say dignitaries, I mean ambassadors, consul generals, somebody from another province or from the United States. And then you would do, like I signed a partnership, agreement with a sister state in China. So you have that quasi-ambassiter role. Again, because the expectation is if you're somebody from another jurisdiction, you're like a consul general or you're an ambassador, the expectation is you will come to the Speaker's Office.

So I did that. That was one of the fun parts of the job. I must have, you know, sat down with over 50 different ambassadors, consul generals, and talked about one thing or another. Wonderful people, and very different than I ever expected. Like, I'm expecting them to be stuffy and, you know, very formal as, no, they're not like that at all. You know, very down-to-earth people. You can see why they would make such great ambassadors.

So I felt very privileged to be able to do that. I love being the ambassador in the house. Like, you know, because I served for nine years as a federal prison judge, you know, that wasn't anything new to me being impartial. But, and then the overriding administration, you know, is kind of cool because I thought, oh, God, this is great. The only job in the world where you're responsible for everything and you don't have to know anything because you have a clerk and a sergeant-at-arms who take care of those things in there, you know, you're like the chair of the board. It's the way people describe it. I'm the chair of the board, and then you have people who take on the CEO roles, if you will, or like Sergeant Arms, the police chief.

And so it's, you know, normally it is born on the single most wonderful job in elected office. I think most people would say that. And most often people only get the job because you have to be voted. Well, people, there's another thing. People think you become speaker because you're calling. vote you in, well, it doesn't really quite work like that. It's not so democratic. What happens is, is the heads of both parties, the House leaders, go around to all the members of the party and say, I need you to fill out a form to say that you do not want to be speaker. So when we have

an election, your name isn't included. So then they go around and collect all these forms. So both House leaders did that. In this case, they both did that, and neither of them wanted to have a speaker, and I'm the only one left. And, you know, the night before, you know, Rich Coleman calls me up and says, the House Leader for Lewis and says, you know, you didn't turn in your form. And I said, yeah, and I'm not going to either. And then he just went ballistic on me. He was so negative. I thought he was talking about himself, but he was, you know, he said, I duped them. I didn't really dupe them. I just said, look, I'm not playing your game anymore.

And then, of course, they kicked me out of the party, which was really a dumb kind of move. But I thought to myself, I can't believe my luck. I thought they've kicked me out. I'm supposed to be independent as a speaker, and I firmly believe in that. And the longer I was in the position, the more I felt that. A speaker should be completely independent of any party.

And here I am. Now I'm really independent. I'm really independent. I think I'm the first independent speaker in over a hundred years. But so I loved it because the speaker, you know, is a very powerful person on the Facebook. Like, you can do a lot. Now, I was always, like, never like that. Like, I'm, like, you know, once again, like, simply because I'm a speaker,

that doesn't mean anything other than they get to wear a funny hat. But if somebody wanted to, you could use that position to do things. Like I set up the speakers form, which was an opportunity to give voices to different parts of society, like First Nations, teachers, all people, and I wanted to hear from them what they think we needed to do to have a better legislature. I was one of the things I felt really good about. Now, the other parts that went on while I was speaker were far more negative. But it was all about my thinking, as always was the case.

If you're an elected official, your first responsibility is to your constituents. Well, let me rephrase it. Your first responsibility is to behave in an ethical manner. Like you carry a moral compass everywhere you go. And then hopefully that will be aligned with, you know, the general public attitudes. And at least you have to say if you disagree, you have to tell them that. Like this doesn't work for my moral compass.

But so you have to be always mindful of doing the right thing and have, and be, you know, unchangeable about that. And then so when you say that, you say, well, what does a person need if I'm, represent them. They need me to be transparent. Why do they need me to be transparent? Because I'm their, I'm their way to get access. And I need to help them get access generally. So, and they need to have an openness. And there needs to be accountability. So all of those things, well, we didn't have the legislature at all. And we had a situation where we weren't F-O-Iable. Like, you know, when anybody wanted it. Well, me, I just threw that out the window. I said, look, anything you want, just calm me up. I'll give it to you. Sorry, freedom of information for people who don't know.

You couldn't do a freedom of information request to the legislature? Well, you can, but you're not getting anything because they're not, a speaker, for example, it's not FOIable. But I just said, that's just garbage. You know, that's not working for me. You want anything? You want to see my phone? You want to see my computer? Whatever you want to do. Did they describe it as a perk to you? that you weren't, like people couldn't get information from you, like, oh, and you're not going to be monitored? Like, that was a freedom that you were going to have? No, but I would say it's pretty clear people used that freedom. And the whole thing about transparency and openness and accountability, if you were wanting to do something untoward, the single best way to do that is just don't have policies.

Like, just don't have anything in place. And before I got there, that was the case for years. You could drive the truck through. It wouldn't matter what it was. You know, and we proposed that they needed, we need to have a policy regarding the harassment in the workplace. Well, that wasn't a novel idea. Everywhere else on the planet had already had policies in place.

Like, duh, that's something you should have. Well, the ledge didn't see fit to do that until I came along and said, what's going on here? You know, everybody else has it. Why don't we? And what did they propose? All roads should lead to the clerk. Like, you want to have a harassment policy?

You all agree to that as long as they come through me. And I'm thinking, well, yeah, now that ain't going to work so well. And so finally, Sonia Fursnow and I from the Green Party said, you know, pounds and this isn't good enough. But what people didn't see is the enormous resistance we had, even suggesting that. Like, how dare you want an independent process here? So everything I tried to do in terms of getting changes like more openness transparency

I wanted there to be more freedom with respect to freedom of information like what's the big deal if you're truly being honest you have nothing to hide and give the information and same as oversights if you can still have a situation

where you can say well you know I don't have to tell everybody in the world why can't you have a situation where it's going to go to a judge it's going to go somewhere so somebody's going to be able to come back to you and say can tell you, they're not pulling a fast one here. And then I wanted a situation in particular.

We had legislation for whistleblowers because so many people worked at the ledge said, I don't think what you're doing here is legal, or I don't think what you're doing here is right. And the first order of a business was to walk them off the property. And these people had some of them, they say, well, excuse me, I've worked for government for 25, 30 years. We don't care. Just ruined their lives, destroyed them.

And they had no recourse because they used the old non-disclosure agreement. Oh, here, sign this non-disclosure agreement. And if you don't, you're not getting your severance pay. Just horrible people, just the way they did business overall. And I would say to those people, like what needs to be asking where it's missing, when now people are saying, well, you know, it's all over, you know, everything's good and it'll never happen again. I'd say, well, if that's a case, why doesn't somebody come forward and say, How did it ever happen in the first place?

How did it happen that one guy could do so much damage or two guys because the chief police? And with all of these elected officials applying apparent oversight and not one of you did anything for over a decade, how is that even remotely possible that somebody would come along as I did and say, you know, I've had several reports of wrongdoing here I think we should investigate. And the first order of business was, how dare you even suggest that?

Let's go after you. Let's vilify you. And then, of course, you know, people have an expectation that maybe one route is to go to the press. I can't tell how many times I was in the L.A. People said, well, I want to go to the press over this. And I'd have to tell them that they'd just be spinning their wheels because the press is not going to be doing anything that's not advantageous to them. So we have a situation where the press wouldn't do anything about these things either.

You see, like, what is going on here? Where is the critical eye? Where is the analytics? Where can a person, an average citizen, turn to know that at least somebody is trying to do a good job? And so I would always say, remind myself, why is it so important? that I have integrity. Why is it so important that I'm honest? Why is it so important that I try and do the right thing?

Because I am de facto an extension of the person who voted for me. If I can't do that, I defrauded them on their vote. Like they did not, they weren't properly. It's just not fair. But I would say most politicians, and I really do mean this, are there wonderful people in political office? Wow, are there ever? There's some incredibly good people

on all sides of the fence. But it's dominated by people who could care less about the average person. They are not there for public service. People say, well, they get into it for the right reasons and then they change the mind. That's why you'll always hear almost every person who finishes politics

would say, you know, if I had to do it over again, I'd speak up more. I'd say more. Well, the reason they don't while they're in is because you either tow the line, it's party for the party, or it's nothing. And that party for the party business is disgusting. Like, even people of faith are so, you know, or they shouldn't say they're not people of faith. I don't regard them as people of faith.

They regard them as people a high degree of religiosity. A big difference. That's a good way of saying that. You know, they're good. God is so back in line when it comes to issues. Party first, God, second. Because it is just horrible. Always, like, the right thing doesn't matter.

You never do anything against the party. And the testament for that is look at the history of Canadian politics and the number of people who've been actually able to say, you know, I don't think this is right in their party and get away with it. That's just a non-starter. In other words, if that wasn't true, in other words, you're saying to me, every single thing a political party does during its tenure is always the right thing and every single person.

It was so right that every single person agreed in their party. Well, we know it's just nonsense. Jody Wilson-Raibold and Jane Philpott are other examples. Very good examples. The same thing as soon as, and you know, God help whoever tries to cross them. Because if people, and Jody would know this for sure, Janefield Watt, like the machine that's behind the scenes, the machinery that, and its tentacles tied to the media, like, they want to hit that destroy mission?

Let's do this. Let's crucify this person simply because they don't like us. And, or they've criticized us. It could be hurtful to us. And I look at what's going on at Ledge and say, what on earth would be wrong in British Columbia for people to come forward and say, let me tell you what really happened here.

Let me just give you the truth. There's no interest in that whatsoever. They don't want to go there. And part of it is, again, well, it taints the whole legislature, but I'm saying, well, the only reason it's tainted is because you've tainted it. You've made it the way it is. And it can only be great if you put the past in the past, but as long as you try and bury it that you've always got those skeletons in your closet, and you can never really look fully forward if you're always trying to bury the bodies or hide the bodies again. That's right.

And it's one of the things that astounded me about being a publicist is how far people would go to bury the bodies. Like how far they would go to be resistant. Like how, like any, like to have the leader of a party stand up in front of a camera and say, stop this nonsense. Like where in a democracy would that be okay? But, you know, when he did it, you know, he's basically applauded by the media. And then, you know, even when he was caught lying doing stuff, I'd go to the media and say, well, you know darn well, he lied when he said that. And they'd say, yeah, we know we're going to use it as a later date. Well, no, there is no later date.

So it was really, it's a really difficult situation, I think, and I don't know what the solution is. I love your idea about, like, people being elected to office and don't get paid. You could have a situation where you say, look, you know, you're one of X number of people who's been selected to work for, four years and it's like a sabbatical from your job and we're asking if you'd be willing to do this for your your province or your country and um or your municipality and uh off you go uh and then you know you can have an honorarium sort of thing but where you could where you could say uh you know i think it's a case in jury trials where people still get paid from their employer uh but then you could all so it's a public service it's like a duty

And then you say, sorry, you're only getting to do this once. Yeah. You know. So make it count. Yeah, make it count. And then you champion people because they express opinions about one thing or another, and you never punish them for their opinions. But you give them credit because they're trying to help the situation.

and everybody's voice gets heard. I mean, that's the one thing about, you know, where you have a situation where, you know, where you had more parties would be helpful because everybody has a proportional representation. Everybody has a voice. I mean, obviously there's complications there, but like when I think, and you said it,

you know, everybody's got something good to say, right? like every party. Like when I listen to the Greens, oh, it's Monday, I like the Greens today, you know, because I like so many of the things they talk about.

I say to myself, oh, thank goodness they're there. And one of the things I especially love about the Greens, you know, people refer to them sometimes as a one person band because they're, you know,

they're so hung up on the environment. Well, that's not entirely true. They're concerned about lots of different things, but they do have a bent towards, you know, climate change and all other things to make a better environment.

But, you know, thank goodness they're the voice they're saying that. Because if they weren't there saying it, who would? There's another example. Like Andrew Weaver, head of the Green Party. On the team, I think, that won the Nobel Prize for some aspect of climate change, effort to do something about climate change.

And, you know, full professor at the University of Victoria, world-renowned, graduate of Cambridge, you know, like he's no slouch. And he stood up with you, right? When you were calling out some of these concerns, he wasn't shying away either. He couldn't have been more helpful. Like people don't know that yet

because you know there's still stuff going on, but yeah, nobody could have been more helpful than Andrew Weaver. He was extremely helpful. But what was interesting, when I was in the liberal, they regularly trashed him, called him an idiot, called him stupid.

Like it wasn't just enough that they said they disagreed. They had to make a point of calling him stupid. It had to be discrediting him. And I'm thinking like, other than a child, a schoolyard bully,

who would do that kind of nonsense? And he has a lot to offer. So they just like, with Mary Ellen Trappell and many, many others I could tell you about, it's like, let's beat them up, let's trash them, let's discredit them in the public's eye,

and for what, their own political game? Like, Andrew Weaver would say this, because we were both from university environments. We always used to talk about how if we did what they did at the legislature, we'd be walked off the property and fired as professors. Like, you know, people aren't going to put up with that garbage, nor should they. But they did it non-stop. up. It was bullying as the order of the day. Lie your face off in the house. Why do you lie

your face off in the house? Because you can't be sued for anything you say in the house. You just make stuff up. And it was pretty hard to take some of this stuff, you know, members lying and with no worry about a consequence because they wouldn't care. And then, of course, it's even more likely that they have a ability to hide it if they have a connection to the administrative side of it. They have a speaker, which is from their party. And of course, that was difficult for them when I was there because I just wouldn't put up with it.

So one of my questions is you went through kind of two different times of challenge. The first was going through the challenges with your own party, but then you face the challenges as a speaker. I'm just wondering, was it, it's hard to think clearly when you're surrounded by nonsense, which was the bigger nonsense. And if you can just lead into your thoughts on the role of media and journalists in regards to what you're calling out, because you've mentioned that you'd expect, and we expect as a populace, that the journalists are going to hold government accountable, that they're going to tell us where they messed up, they're going to tell us where they could have done better.

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Tyler Olson, who's, they're trying something new with OMG Media. I'm hoping to have Farhan Mohammed on who's got OMG Media. It's not funded by anybody. It's self-funded. It's a new style of journalism through newsletters. And I'm hoping that investigative journalism makes a comeback where we do in-depth reporting. But it sounds like that was one of the problems as well. You were being painted very like an aggressive, angry, hateful person.

That's how the videos were sort of set up. Was that really difficult to watch? Yeah. Well, there was everything from somebody wrote that it should be. legal to spit on me in the street and I should burn in hell forever but you know and you know journalists after journalist had some snide remark and even if somebody rolled back the tape of you know some of the mainstream media reports even the the anchors were sneering you know when they talked about me the vancouver sun you know published cartoons saying i was worse than the grinch

the editorial board from the vancouver sun said horrible things and of course uh no matter what I said, they just wouldn't print it. It wouldn't matter if I went to them and said, hey, look, here's this as I did to more than one journalist. They said, look, I'm not making this stuff up. Here, look for yourself. Tell me it's not true. They would repeatedly kill the story.

And I would say make stuff up over and over and over again. So here I am faced with politicians who for their own reasons, you know, don't want the truth to come out and are moving heaven and earth to stop it. Like they wanted to unseat me as speaker complaining about one thing or another related to the investigation. And most of it was just plain lies. and I don't say most of it was all just plain lies and I couldn't stand up and say excuse me like this is not true because in part a lot of it related to a police investigation

and it wasn't going to do anything to disrupt that I was calling for things like calling for an audit meanwhile they're moving heaven and earth to stop one from ever happening so then I go to the media and the media, with some exceptions, were moving heaven and earth to paint a distorted picture of what was going on there.

Their entire focus primarily was on, this should never have happened. These two wonderful people who were walked off the property, what they didn't report, is they were unceremoniously walked out the property. property. Well, who was involved in that decision to welcome off the property? It was on the advice of a constitutional lawyer. And who was in that room? It wasn't just me. It was none

other than Mary Polack from the liberals and Mike Farnsworth from the NDP, who were all parted to a meeting the night before to say, we've got to do this, according to the speaker. And then, of course, you know, after it happened, you know, with all the blames on me. How could I have done something so stupid. I was just making stuff up. So then they called for, and this is another way in which you manipulate conditions, they called for an inquiry, a workplace inquiry, by a retired chief justice, McLaughlin, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. Well, they didn't just say here, come and investigate this. They said, here is a narrow set of parameters to be done in a limited amount of time and work with that.

Well, of course, White just knew from the start it wasn't going to get at the truth. It was just going to be a difficult situation. And as it was, you know, one of the people lied to her, ultimately got convicted for lying under the Police Act and her investigation of this whole thing. But even though she found in her investigation that the clerk was not entitled to his money, there was no legal basis for paying his money. How much money was it again?

$257,000. And what was the consequence for that? Nothing, nothing. Never got asked to pay the money back. In fact, just the opposite. The House leaders wrote a letter saying that none of us are ever allowed to see anything negative about this person.

It was just crazy. I'm looking at this and say, what am I missing? And this equation. And then, of course, later, the Sergeant Arms, de facto police chief, got convicted under the... the police act, well, when I called for an investigation, I can't tell you how much resistance they put up to having that investigation. They said, no way, we're not doing this. And I said,

no, I'm sorry, I have the right as the speaker to call for an investigation on the police act. That's the way it'll be independent outside this place. And sure enough, he got found guilty of discredible contract and what they described as an egregious breach of trust and neglect of duty. But you would think that after that, that the media would have said something about it? Not a chance. Even when they talked about it, you'll notice that on the reporting of the clerk, they just refuse to make reference. They'll say things like, well, it's no big deal. It's only one charge you got convicted of. It's actually two, but one because of the nature of the law can only be one. And it's no big deal. They say it's one guy. No, it wasn't. It was two guys. It was the head of

the organization, the clerk, and it was the head of the police service. And how long was this going on? Like for over a decade. So, so I'm saying, and I've said it then and I'll say it again, it's plain outright corruption. When a police officer does something like that lies in an investigation, that's corruption. When they facilitate the ability of others to do dishonest up, I can't give in to the nuances right now, but I can tell you, people would find it unbelievable about what the connections are there. But there's no interest in the press. And part of the problem is some of these press people, like Jazz Joe Hall, is a former liberal. You know, he's a former MLA.

Like, when he interviews me, I've got to tell you, I'll tell him flat out if he's listening. Like, he's not really interviewing me. He's waiting for me to say something he thinks he might be able to sue me for. Like when I mentioned, reminded him that the deputy chief of police, I said he was a dirty cop. After the break, he goes like, would you stand by that comment? Would you say that? Well, what he was really saying is, I just want to get it on record, so perhaps we can sue you. well, of course, I'm not that stupid,

but it still illustrates how this connection they have and how many people in politics go off to be consultants. You know, they're consultants, they're lobbyists of some sorts. Like the nexus there is like, it's just not a comfortable situation. So, you know, overall, the one fundamental problem I'd say in some, we have people in elected office who do not have a moral campus

and that's in my experience most of them you cannot count on them to do the right thing and you can almost never count on them to do anything which is going to go against the party ever because the consequences will be too severe for them they will not stand up and do the right thing and those who do like Jody Wilson-Rabel

sorry you will be punished and then they'll get away with it because at the end of the day the story will be spun in such a manner that they've done nothing wrong and she's the bad person and by the way everybody has a short memory

and people will forget about it soon enough anyway so don't worry about it so there's that there's the infrastructure the policies and the practices that need to be under pretty significant scrutiny Like this business of saying, oh, we got an all-party committee.

Oh, no, you don't. You got a part of this cut both sides on it, but it's chaired by the party in power. So that's always going to land on the side of government. That's one. And anybody on that committee who isn't going to do that is going to get told that they're going to get punished from the parties. And then there's these, like, expense claims, for example. People say, well, gee, let's publish expense claims online.

Well, I can show you exactly cases where MLA's expense claims are published online, and it's flat out fraud. Like, there's no way somebody can be in the same place at the same time, you know, in two different places at the same time. And the way they get away with some of these things is they say, and this is where it's the enemy of transparency. They'll introduce a policy saying, oh, when we publish an expense claim online,

we can't show you the hotel the person stayed at. We need to erase that because it puts the person at risk. Well, I'm sorry. I mean, other people do jobs and stay in hotels and they don't erase them on their expense claims. What's so special about you as an MLA? But once you do that,

then that's a potential front because how do you know where they really stay? You know, it's like, or allowing people the submitting expense came, oh, by the way, let's submit another one four months later. And the average person looking at isn't going to join the two together because they happen at two different times. And, I mean, there's all kinds of ways. I mean, sure, people are experts on how to cheat. Government can give people a lesson.

But I would say there's no real interest on behalf of government of dealing with these things in a fully open, transparent way. by a long shot. The other way they can do things is they'll say, well, we're making a government decision about something. But what you don't see is that that decision is made before people walk into a committee room. Like they're talking to each other and saying, well, this is where this is going to land. So there's that. Or they make a policy decision by not saying anything. Like we do reviews of budgets and say, how is the spending going? Well, God help you if you talked about how much spending there wasn't by caucuses

that public is paying for. That's just considered out of bounds, no matter which party you're on. You just keep it off the table. So there's just a long list of things that need to be corrected. Politicians, structures, policies, and, media. I just want to say a reminder here again that for me, it's not all media. That's for sure. Do you have any recommendations? Yeah, Mike Smith is a fantastic person in the media as a show on NW. He doesn't always agree with us, but boy, he's one of the very few people from the press gallery

over the legislature who said, yeah, no, I'm going to listen. CTV. I would say, they generally see TV, has been extraordinarily open and helpful. Scott Roberts, who's no longer the anchor in Vancouver, but John Woodward. So the whole CTV. But why CTV? Well, they'll tell you, because they're into investigative reporting, you know. So, whereas, so people should take a lesson from CTV. So that's the main difference between global and CTV.

Most people see them as the same thing. Like most people who just flip on the news, they don't know what the difference be between the two. No, I would say it's investigative reporting. Like, one of the things you notice with Global, it's the same story regurgitated over and over again and the same footage. And it's, I'm not saying this is a lie,

but you can't tell people half the story and expect that to represent the truth, you know, of what's really going on. And they do lots of presenting half the story. So I would say, say like it global used to be well it's the most watched newscast in province or it was but i would say it's been on the decline as this mainstream media and i say thank god finally it caught up with them they're bad habits and they complain about you know it's it's not us it's you know the audience

it's the audience and i'm saying no it's it's because the audience is sick and tardy of garbage um so that's what's happened so they've done it to themselves and i said that to them Like they're, you know, they have nobody to blame it themselves, and I couldn't be happier that we're seeing the demise of them because they are, some media are nothing more than a cancer on journalism, cancer on society, because it's such a major manipulation of truth. And they'll argue, well, like, you know, I'm hampered because my editor is putting the pressure on me to get the story out. you know, we didn't have enough space, we only have two minutes, well, how about saying nothing then, right? I mean, that would be the better way to go. So I couldn't agree more. I think if you're hearing this and you're upset, then you have a responsibility to take action,

whether it's contacting your local municipality, whether it's contacting your MLA, whether it's joining a group like the Canadian Taxpayers' Federation, which you did an excellent interview with, which I recommend people check out because I could not. rival the quality of questions in regards to exactly what happened at the legislature, I thought that conversation went incredibly well. I would say that if you are frustrated by government, then you have a fiduciary duty to your community, to yourself, to the well-being of your children and your grandchildren to take action, to vocalize what you'd like to see improved through letters, posting on social media, through starting your own podcast, through having the conversation, because this does not

get fixed by you being frustrated. Nothing happens when you complain that nothing's changing. That doesn't improve anything for anyone, and it's so easy for us to sit back and say, government's not working, my vote doesn't matter. That's the easy way. The hard way is to say, what do I have to do to make a difference? And I think that that's often the mistake we all make is we let ourselves off the hook because it's somebody else, it's somewhere else, and it's not my fault. It is your fault because you live here and you've lived here for however long you've lived here, and you play a role. I believe that Daryl Plekis stepped up in a role that I think he could tell was not going to be kind to him that wasn't going to be easy. He didn't do that because things weren't going well. He did it because things were going well and we're incredibly lucky that you chose to do that. I think that what John Martin said about how well you have it and so now you have a responsibility to go and prove something that's dark. I think that that's commendable. I think that that's true of so many people. It's our life is so. good, why would I want to muck it up with the affairs of my province, of my community? It's the

exact opposite. If your life is going well, you play a role in improving things for others. And when I just interviewed Shelley Canning, she's a nurse or was a practicing nurse, she's talking about the nursing shortage and that that needs to be addressed. There's many problems in our community, and it's your job to find one that you're passionate about and to try and help in any way you can. Darrell, I could not be more grateful for this conversation. This has been such a, such a pleasure to sit down with you, to hear your journey. I really hope we get to sit down again in the future, perhaps when the investigation wraps up. That would be wonderful.

Because you are an inspiration, your consistency in believing that people have value. I know that might seem obvious to you because maybe it's been your value, your whole life. But so many people lack that feeling that they matter, that they could make a difference. And that's part of the reason I started this. So I just could not be more grateful to have sat down with you. You've inspired me to attend a law school. You were the first to say, why don't you go to law school? I think you've done that for many people, and we're just so lucky to have you as part of our community. Well, it's very kind of you. Thank you for having me here.