Shaun Newman Podcast - #348 - Derek From

Episode Date: November 28, 2022

He is an Alberta lawyer specializing in charter and constitutional issues, he is one of the authors of the Free Alberta Strategy & a Columnist for the Western Standard. Let me know what you think Text me 587-217-8500

Hey everybody, this is Paul Brandt. This is Wayne Peters. This is Sean Baker. I'm Megan Murphy. This is Jess Moskaloop. I'm Rupa Supermonia. This is Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks.

Happy Monday. How's everybody doing this morning? I hope your weekend was just ticitty boo. Tickety-boo. That's how I feel. We got to go to Eminton, playing a little hockey game at Rogers Place. That was pretty cool. You know, that's a first for me.

I've never got to do that before. And let me tell you, being on the ice down at ice level is pretty cool. And I was pretty fortunate to get to share that experience with the brothers and have a little bit of fun. Anyways, that's a side note from, you know, the weekend at B. Hopefully, wherever you were at, you had a little bit of fun as well. Now, before we get to today's episode, let's get to today's episode, sponsors. First, Canadians for Truth, their nonprofit organization consisting of Canadians who believe

in honesty, integrity, and principal leadership and government as well as the Canadian Bill of Rights, Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the Rule of Just Laws. They've got Theo Jamie and, well, Theo and Jamie have been doing their ice and fire, fire and ice. I think it's fire and ice. Showson shows live, they've had Chris Barber, Arter Polowski, and they've been, I believe they got one coming up in emminton i think it's emminton and uh all you got to do is go to canaan's for truth dot ca you can see where their next shows are going to be at and anything else that uh canadians for truth is up to terry brunt terry bry bryant i'm reading old show notes folks

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Shout out to Dan if he's listening. He's out in Alberta now, so I'm hoping I can corner him in to the studio or maybe invite him. man, because I think it'd be cool to do a podcast with him while he's now in the land of the free, so to speak. Either way, Windsor Plywood, they have got great work going on. You want a chunk of wood, go take a look at what they're dealing with. Whether we're talking mantles, decks, windows, doors, or sheds, maybe bar tops, of course, podcast tables.

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Anyways, they're delivering to your farm commercial or oilfield locations for more information. Visit them at Hancock Petroleum.ca. He's an Alberta lawyer specializing in chartering constitutional issues. He is one of the authors of the free Alberta strategy, a strategy penned back in September of 2021, which a cornerstone of this is the Alberta Sovereignty Act. I'm talking about Derek Fromm. So buckle up, here we go. This is Derek Fromm, and you are listening to the Sean Newman podcast.

Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today. I'm joined by Derek Fromm. So first off, sir, thanks for hopping on. Thank you. Now, you were on one of the roundtables with the Western Standard back when I was rolling with that. So I think the listener knows exactly who you are, but I'm going to force you to do it all over again and give them a little bit of background. That way, if they don't know what I'm talking about, can't remember you. It was a little while ago.

It was a few months ago. And I think it would be good for the conversation today. let you give your piece about who you are and then we'll hop rate in. Okay. So I'm, I'm born and raised in Saskatchewan. I grew up outside of Moosecha, that area, played hockey, my whole young life. And then after, after being in that area for a number of years,

I moved off and did my university in Ontario, where I attended Waterloo. And then after that, I got married, then attended law school at Western. And so I'm a lawyer and have been in a practice. in this province for, let's say, 12 years. I'm not sure. Something like that, 12 years. And for the first, I guess it's more than that, maybe 13 years. For the first 11 years of that, I practiced constitutional law.

So I did constitutional law with a charitable organization, the Canadian Constitution Foundation. And over my time there, I had many of my cases that I was instrumental in bringing before the courts would win their way all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. and we would get various levels of disappointment in our rulings. I think the most famous one in terms of famous Canadian cases was probably that of Gerard Como, who was a New Brunswick man, who went and bought beer in Quebec. And this would have been, I think it made it to the Supreme Court of Canada around 2018.

So he went and bought beer in Quebec, but unknown to him, there's actually a federal law that prohibits transporting liquor, intoxicating liquors across provincial borders, unless that liquor is already owned by then. What was the queen? Now it would be the king. And so he was caught in a police sting operation to collect the roundup people who were, well, I guess, essentially good shoppers.

He went and found the best price across the border. So he was penalized for being a good shopper. And so we challenge that because the Constitution of Canada is quite clear that there's supposed to be free trade between the provinces, all articles, growth, manufacture, and produce. And so we went to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, of course, carved out some interesting case law on it. Now the Constitution has not been vindicated, but we're at a better place than we work. So that's what I mean when various levels of disappointment. We never, when you're like myself, I'm a very free market oriented person.

I'm, I wouldn't say I'm conservative, liberal, socialist, none of those things. I would say that my tendency and desire is to see much, much less government intrusion on individual lives. And that it would be better if individuals work together and people kept their own property. And rather than use the coercive force of the state to enforce behavior, on individuals. So I'm a very free market guy. You could say limited government, I guess, but it might even go farther than limited government. So hearing all that, March 2020 roughly happens. And you're sitting in a, you know, I think all of us had our different chairs we were sitting in as we buckled up for the ride we've been into. But coming from knowing the Constitution and

challenging different things and understanding different laws and everything else. As things start to unfold, at what point did you go, what the heck is going on? Because, you know, Derek, I got to be honest, I talked to when I was working in my previous job, there was coercion, a little bit of force, et cetera. I think nobody missed out on that if you're working a job of you need to get this or else. and I remember trying to reach out to some different lawyers and nobody would touch it. And I was like, what are we talking about? I don't want to do this.

I just don't want to do this. So I'm curious, as a lawyer, what point did it start to like, that just crossed about 18 different lines? Well, you know, you asked such an enormous question. And it is the fundamental question of everything that's transpired. Do I say two and a half years? Well, we're going on almost three. Yeah, it's closing down. Yeah.

So I think you have to wear two hats. You have to wear the hat of the political philosopher, which fortunately, for me, I think it's fortunate. That's what I studied when I was at Waterloo is my background is in political philosophy. And you also have to have the hat of a lawyer. And those two things don't necessarily meet in most lawyers. Most lawyers, I would say lawyers come from diverse backgrounds, intentionally so. The law societies and law schools prefer lawyers from diverse backgrounds because when there's a diverse practice, more people can find appropriate representation. That's the theory.

I think it's a good theory. But in March 2020, so I was transitioning to private practice at that point. I had left my constitutional practice. And so when it all started to happen, I thought of it, hey, here's an opportunity for me to stay home with my kids and homeschool them. And so I ended up having a lot of time in my hands to read. And so I took an online course. I'm going to forget the, or I shouldn't say I took it.

I audited an online course from one of the universities. on the East Coast and the States. I can't remember exactly which one it was now. You can tell how much I cherish that opportunity. But it was on virology, because I just wanted to get my feet wet and understand what was being said. And some of the course did discuss vaccine theory and immunology as well. And so that started for me, I think, when did the restrictions come down in Alberta,

the 21st of March, I think. If I remember correctly, it was on a Monday because we were all kind of waiting with waiting with baited breath about what was going to happen to our school kids. And the Friday, before that, my kids were both sick with something. So I thought,

you know, I don't want to send them to school while we have all this going on. People will be upset. So I'm just going to stay home with them. They stayed home with me and they didn't go back to school until what next fall, I think. So I had the opportunity to stay home with them. But I also, that time, when I had all this reading opportunity, I read as soon as I could and heard about it, which was within days,

Neil Ferguson's and Imperial College London, the, I guess, forecasting, the modeling that they had done. And that model in that paper, that rendition of it, that addition of Imperial College's work, is what had the UK so drastically changed. its policies like on a dime because Neil Ferguson I Neil Ferguson has a reputation for grossly exaggerating and I'm suspicious grossly exaggerating for pay I'm suspicious of that I don't know it's a suspicion and so I read that and then I read his previous work for for mad cow disease and some some disease and sheep and and other such things.

And he's always out by an order of magnitude, if not two, in his predictions. And so when this one came along, I read it, and he was predicting, my recollection was, in the first six months, two million deaths in the United States and half a million deaths in the UK. And so my first thought was, this is insane,

but man, this guy has a bad reputation. Why does anyone listen to him? And I just was all news, to me, so I didn't know. But I was suspicious right from the beginning. But then the other thing that I knew is I'm able enough to understand, I'm smart enough to make myself dangerous, I think. And so I was already reading about how viruses spread and reading about what happened in the Princess Cruise Line, which is before that is if my recollection now was that that was February. And so here we had all these individuals essentially confined on this cruise ship.

And the demographic there was generally older people who weren't necessarily in good health. And this virus that we were going to be what we were told was novel at the time. You remember that they said the novel coronavirus? Well, that's a, you know, you don't hear that anymore because it wasn't true. and they likely knew it wasn't true at the time, but that was how it was cast in the media. But we had lots of information from the Princess Cruise Line. So then I came across a data analyst from Ireland named Ivor Cummings,

and he's been doing great work on this and analyzing the data. And, you know, it's funny because it became very apparent to me, and I was primed for this, it became very apparent to me early on that wasn't being said in the media, local radio stations in Calgary, national television stations in Canada, and, you know, CNN, all the others that come in here, was very, very different from what my experience on the ground was. And remains to this day to be very different from what I've observed with my eyes and my ears. And I think it's very clear that there was an actual virus circulating. I think it wasn't nearly the deadly plague that we were initially led to believe.

And I also firmly believe now there was sufficient information available at the time in March 2020 to do otherwise. And that actually, you know what, that's, that information was precisely what Sweden based its response on. And so I would say early in March, I lost many friends because I kept saying, look, we've got a problem here and we're dealing with it precisely. wrong way. We're going to end up with all sorts of spin-off unintended consequences. There's going to be problems with human immunity following this if we isolated from each other. Turns out that's true, but what do I know? I'm just a lawyer. It looks like there can be no vaccine that's developed in this period of time that would be either safe or effective. I think the safety is still being questioned and we won't know about safety until many many years from now. And

effectiveness. Well, we know it's completely ineffective. It does not stop the transmission of the SARS COVID-2 virus or prevent COVID-19 disease. And it looks like, just like the early studies with mRNA vaccinations, that it could actually reduce immunity. And I'm sure your listeners are familiar with this, but there were studies early on when MRNA vaccines were first conceived of developed and if I'm correct my recollection is that those were shortly following the first SARS pandemic in the early 2000s and those vaccines were discontinued in the development because it turns out when you took the vaccine you got the disease you're inoculated for so it wasn't a very effective program and I'm suspicious that that is what is happening now I don't know and the data is emerging on

that and again I'm just a lawyer I'm not one of these ordained experts that the media likes to title people as, even though serious experts never accept the title of expert. But that the media seems to ordain people with that sort of, and then they become a priest that can say no wrong, and that their word is the word of God. The word of science is a word. So very early on, I was suspicious, and I was primed to be counter-narrative already because of my philosophical bent, my view of life. And now looking back on it as a constitutional lawyer and a political philosopher, what I see is this is in the legal realm when we're dealing with restrictions, workplace coercion, and actually what I count was really extortion. What I see is there's a philosophical battle going on here. And it's much deeper and more problematic in countries like Canada.

In the U.S., the U.S. still has a culturally, the society in the U.S. has a sort of basis of morality that Canada lacks. There are more religious people, a more individual morality-focused people. And that goes through the legal profession as well. So it could be that the typical American believes, you know, there's right and wrong that exist prior to the law. And the law tries to reflect morality right and wrong to some degree, but the two aren't necessarily the same. Like there's laws that really, you know, where your fence goes and how high it is. That's not necessarily a moral issue, but do not murder like a wrongful killing. that's a moral issue.

So the law and morality tend to map on each other quite well in many circumstances, but they're not the same thing. Now, in Canada, we fall more into a tradition called legal positivism, where what's right and wrong is determined by what the law says. And so I can guarantee you can go out in the street and you can ask a Canadian on the street interviews, is abortion wrong? And some portion of people will say, well, it's legal, isn't it? But that's not the question.

Is it morally right or morally wrong? It's not whether or not it's permitted by the law. And if you were to have that same sort of approach in the States, I can almost guarantee you that there would be more people than in Canada who would recognize that morality and law are different. But our charter, for the longest time, there's been a battle between these lawyers, who think the charter tells us what we're allowed, it gives us our rights. And lawyers who believe that the charter is merely an expression of our pre-existing,

potentially God-given rights. And so what I see has happened in the last two years, or three years, is we have a battle between those leaders and those lawyers who think that the rest of us have to do what we're told because it's moral, because the law is where we derive our morality from. But in the other side, people like me who think that the law only imperfectly reflects morality, I was very concerned early on because what I saw is a complete and sudden like variation, an abandoning of what I thought were moral principles, that individual should be to make choices about their own bodies, that parents have certain rights over their own kids,

and you have a fiduciary duty to raise your kids and keep them safe and provide for them. But increasingly, over the last three years, it's become clear to me, not few Canadians share my views and that they think that the state is somehow where we derive these things. It's from government. It's from the courts. It's from law. that whatever the government says must be right. And that's where our morality comes from is what's legal. And so I've, I tweeted too much over the last three years and I've since bombed my Twitter account almost a year ago because I'm just, I'm frustrated. And I can remember tweeting to Jason Kenney very early on in the, in Alberta's response. Like, well, now that, now that

you've got everyone into a panic, how do you plan to get, get things back under control? How do you, when you, when you intentionally, when you intentionally undermine the social fabric that binds Albertans together and makes our lives so enriching and wonderful, when you intentionally rip that up and cause panic and turns out somewhat an exaggerated panic, how do you plan I'm putting that back together? What's the plan? And you know what? There never was any plan.

And I can just, in my mind, I can just posit this idea that, you know, it's this sort of statist mindset where the government tells us what's right and wrong. Everything good comes from the government. And you know, essentially, it seems to me what people have done is, in a larger cultural sense, this is the political philosopher. In a larger cultural sense, we've replaced our religion with the worship of the state. And over the last three years, the priests, instead of the vestments that they normally carry, they wear white lab coats and they're ordained by the media.

And we have our ritualistic beliefs. We no longer practice ritualistic religion. what we do is we take the sacraments of injections and mask wearing and social distancing. And it seems to me there's a hollow spot in the hearts of many people. And they replaced that hollowness with a purpose. And that purpose was the avoidance of COVID. And so to me, that was my opinion very early on during all of this. Yeah.

Is it possible then? because to me I would put when you talk about having like utmost faith in your government I was one of those people like hand up yeah like I didn't I didn't you know

I just wanted to go about my day but I mean when you're kind of in calm seas even though maybe some awful things are going on you just nobody slapped you across the face so to speak that's right but I mean everybody's heard my story

a thousand times over now as I talk on this podcast you know like I was you know it was March not March, sorry, it was August 2021 when I started a real shift in this sucker. And so I go, if I can do that change, lots of people can do that change. And although a lot of people have utmost faith

in their government, I think, you know, if there's one thing that maybe is a good thing, is that maybe COVID is, you know, Jesus is an awful thing to say out loud. But like, maybe it was the thing that was needed here in Canada because it's it's it's slapped a lot of people across face it's woke a ton of people up to the fact that whoa like we need to rein our government back in because you know when

I hear you talk about legal positivism positiveism I never heard that before versus you know pretty much black or white and does the law try and map over that I'm like to me I feel like a lot of people would say the second sounds like way, way better, right? Like, I'm not saying the law is going to get it perfect. Yeah. But I don't think, you know, a piece of paper shouldn't be how you get your rights, right? Your rights should be there from the start. I think that makes a lot of sense.

When you say, oh, the law says it, it's like, well, then, if the law comes into place, a lot of shady shit can go down. And that's kind of what feels like happened here over the last, you know, when when a lawyer won't say no you're no you got this on your side everybody's like oh I don't want that I feel like that's what woken a ton of people up I think that's a positive I think that I do it doesn't mean that we didn't go through some shit we have we still are there's people that are not in good spots yeah I'm hoping that's that's a a positive on what's been going on I mean it's not over I mean to all my lovely listeners we all know it's not over yet um you know I

I'm just, I just got to bring up Bill C-11 here as a broadcast guy, right? A guy trying to do a show. So, you know, and I don't think I'm doing anything too wacky, but that isn't the case for a lot of people. They assume this is, you know, whatever you want. Yeah, I completely agree with you. Like, it, you know, it's a, it could have a positive result, but it's come at a terrible price. I don't think it was worth paying the price to results, to get this result. But how, how, how else?

Derek, would you have gotten it? I mean, here's the thing. Like, you wouldn't have forced a bunch of us to really get out of the company, not a comfy life. I don't know. Like, just, you know, like, like, terrible price. Yeah. I think that's, I think that's a very perfect timed, uh, term for what is, what has gone on. But it is woken a lot of people up. I agree. And, you know, the only reason I can, like, I, I, I don't claim to be a very insightful person. I just had this experience earlier. than many people. So when I started practicing constitutional law with the CCF, I came across what I thought was incredible. And I couldn't frame it this way. There seems to be sort of an unexamined belief in Canadian culture that once somebody becomes elected, wins a popularity contest. That's my simple view.

Wins a popularity contact. Or starts accepting a paycheck from the government that they suddenly become angels, that they have the purest of motivations, they lose all their human characteristics, and suddenly they're pure as the fresh fallen white snow. Or I might phrase it a different way. In a competition's mind, right, try it out for team after team after team after team, you assume the best make the team. So you assume when it's the people leading your country,

they have gone through such a vetting process and have had to compete against the best of the best of the best, except what I'm learning, you know, I'm still learning, is it's absolutely a popularity contest. But even then, it's a popularity contest, only a portion of the country even knows about because the rest of us don't have time for it or whatever. It's not put on.

on a, I don't know, a pedestal isn't the right word, but you know what I mean? Like, it's not, we have more intelligent discussion on Team Canada's hockey team than we do on our Alberta politics or wherever you're listening to this, any province, or even drill that down to city politics, even to school boards, et cetera. And what all of us have come to learn over this last two years is, I tell you what, that should be reexamined. because there is a ton of harm or just a ton of like things that can really impact your life that are put through those spots. And it isn't always the best, right? It's the people that have figured that out and are just getting involved.

That's right. And so I agree with all that. And one of the things that struck me early on working with the CCF is I got to kind of see behind the curtain as it were. I got to, in litigation, we were involved with in Ontario. We realized that the government lawyers there weren't actually docketing their time. And they had no idea how much time they were spending, how much money they were spending, working against us. And I got to see experts in health care in BC who, I mean, healthcare in this country is socialized medicine. We do not have a system where we have public health insurance.

We have socialized medicine, meaning at the beginning of the year, some bureaucrat with the authority of the government says we have X number of dollars to spend on this procedure. Once that money is spent, that procedure will not be done any further this year. That is called rationing, healthcare rationing. And you know what? In Canada, that results in people dying. Like annually, people die, waiting on these lists that will not grow smaller. And you know that the solution to it is not to increase the funding. The solution to it is to allow individuals to freely come into contract together and solve the problem.

And it was like, so I saw this and because I was involved in litigation on both those instances, human rights legislation. No one even understands the human rights legislation that exists all throughout this country until they become the, the defendant in a spurious or vexatious human rights complaint. They have to expend a lot of time and effort defending themselves from something that is without merit. And then all of a sudden they realize this has been here the whole time. I had no idea. And then they become a zealot. And so I think the process that you went through was sort of an awakening.

And, you know, it's actually, in some ways, it's wonderful that many of us Canadians are able to live our lives freely as we do. without worrying about these sorts of things because it shows two things. One, how rich we are, that we can afford to live without being concerned about these things. And secondly, how free we actually were. And those were wonderful. But now that our prosperity and our freedom have been so obviously attacked and restricted by the very people that were elected to protect. it on our behalf.

It's a betrayal. And so I think people rightfully are waking up. But, you know, it's an interesting process. So I've been told by doctors who were involved with AHS early on in the vaccination program, that AHS was absolutely convinced, and public

health was actually absolutely convinced in this province that there's going to be something like 50% of the people are going to rush out and take any vaccine that you put in front of them. These are the sorts of people that put music videos on YouTube and accept pay from public organizations to do PSAs. They're going to rush out and do it because they think it was their duty, which is morally

dubious. You don't have a duty to inject things into your body. You absolutely do not. And then there's going to be another 30% roughly that you're going to take some convincing, but they'll get there eventually. Then there's the remaining 20%. You're going to have to squeeze that orange heart to get any more juice out of it.

You might be able to convince through very coercive tactics to get 10% of that, 10% more out of that 20. Bringing us up to 90%. And then after that, there's people that are just going to dig in their heels and are not going to do what they're asked or told to do. And for various reasons, idiosyncratic. reasons. They don't want to do it. They're kind of, they're just ornery people or they have legitimate concerns. And AHS was planning that. And so when I see the health restrictions that went

in Alberta over the years, this was a very intentionally crafted policy that was considered long in advance. There was never any real concern about the rights of individuals. It was all sort of blindered, like horse blinders, a blindered vision for a particular goal. And they were essentially permitted by our politicians to run roughshod over the rights of Albertans and permitted sadly, I think in many cases, it seems like, by the legal profession, who for the most part seemed to be asleep at the switch. But there may have been other reasons for that. Like I've heard rumors that some of the major firms, Canadian firms, were put on retainer by various governments so they'd be conflicted out and unable to represent individuals who were

fighting against restrictions. So it was a very intentionally crafted policy. And again, back to that, you don't become an angel when you get into government. What would you do if you were the owner of a business with monopoly and you were trying to do this? Well, you would take precisely these steps to protect your economic interest. you would find a way to make it happen, right? And you would expend the money that you need to make it happen. And I'm afraid that our government functioned like the worst sort of monopoly during this. And it just happens to be the monopoly has control of what our social lives are like.

And they can push us around and they can put us in prison, drag us to the courts and find us. And they have the guns. So we pretty much have to do what they tell us. And if they then take away our only avenue of redress, a plausible one, which is through the courts, what are we going to do? Well, we're going to have to get in our trucks and drive them off to Ottawa and make a big stink there. But look what happens then. And so the rules of the game were stacked from the beginning.

It was intentional, I'm convinced. And there is very little hope of, of, of getting redress through the law and through our Constitution because it turns out that the legal positives, positivists, I believe, have won this debate as the last three years have demonstrated and they get to decide what our rights are. And in terms of, in times of apparent crisis,

we don't have to concede the point that there was a crisis, but let's just say for the sake of argument, there was a crisis. The Constitution still operates during crises and provincial law still operates during crises and the rule of law is supposed to be operative during a crisis and but it all fell by the wayside because they get to decide what our what our rights are well you're painting a pretty bleak picture you know i look at i look at some of the positive come out and you know one of the things that frustrated me and i could not understand

is why the law would not stop things in its tracks. You know, I feel like, and maybe this is just a ill-found belief that the law is supposed to be there to protect its citizens, you know? Like, no, you can't do that because here is why. Instead, it was bent the other way to go, this is why we can do it. And we're seeing, you know, I mean, the commission right now on the emergencies act is is almost proof in the pudding. I have,

you know, like it's almost, it's not hilarious. In a dark, morbid sense, it's hilarious how everyone's saying the threshold for invoking it was not met at any point in time. And yet they're trying to expand the definition now

so that they could say that that's why we invoked it. It's like, if you're paying attention to this, this is wild. Because, I mean, the whole point of putting in things is so that you just don't invoke it. You put up these stuff.

cap so the government doesn't invoke it. It's like, you know, and so I come back to the last several years, the amount of fear that was pushed on a population basically put us all in a state of Wolfurgo things that protect us under the idea that we're saving each other from a evil or greater evil. But under the guys, I mean, literally, we just all lived through it and we just gave away. So in your mind, we're not clawing back. all that or are we? No, I think what it's done is it's peeled back the curtain, like the Wizard of Oz reference.

It's peeled back the curtain and people are waking up what's really behind the scenes. But it doesn't change the fact that that's all that it is. So will things change? Well, governments respond to incentives. And the only incentive that a politician really gets is the electoral cycle. And so that's where Ronald Reagan had that famous quote, that something to the effect that freedom, the death of freedom is only,

the loss of it is only a generation away. And then I remember thinking, well, it's actually only the next election away. And then early in 2020, I realized actually it's only the next, the next purported crisis away, the death of freedom. But, yeah, no, I don't see,

I don't see much changing. what I think needs to happen is hopefully more Canadians wake up. I don't know how to, I hate to use the word woke because that's not what I'm talking about at all. But I mean that's sort of like that they've peeled back the curtain and they have an honest view of what's pulling the levers. And I don't mean it's a conspiracy. I don't mean that at all.

It's just very basic incentives like governments respond to incentives. So if they're going to get voted out. out because people are scared, they're going to respond to the fear and enact legislation to alleviate that fear. So the quote you're talking about from Ron Reagan is this. Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for protected and handed on for them to do the same.

Or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once in the United States where men were free. and what you're talking about I've been thinking a lot about this, right? Because at times, the solution is paralyzing, right? Like, how do you fix Canada, Derek? How do you fix Canada?

And what I've got to is, I certainly want to talk about what's going on in Canada because once upon a time, I thought, you know, if it happens over in Toronto, it's never going to filter down to where I'm at, you know, small town, Alberta, Saskatchewan. And yet the last two years have proven just that, right?

I mean, that's not a great thought. And I remember years ago listening to Joe Rogan talk to somebody about social credit scores and, oh, Don, what's the term I'm looking for here with, like, essentially welfare? It's basically serp. I can't think of the word right now. in some way. Guaranteed basic income. Basic income. Thank you.

And I remember thinking, this is like easy five years ago. I remember thinking, man, that's a wild idea. Like, oh, can you imagine a world? Anyways. So I've been thinking, I think a lot of Canadians have been thinking about this, right? Like, how do you, you know, you see what happened in February in Ottawa. And, you know, I've talked to, you know, like Chris Barber comes to mine. He was on not that long ago.

And he just said, you know, it'll never happen again like that. Like, it was so spontaneous. And so, like, everybody, it was just a culmination of, like, two years of what it was and people being frustrated and they all show up. And to me, and I'm curious your thoughts on this, you know, the law is only as powerful as the people who support the law, right? And so I go,

we all keep staring at how we can fix Alberta, Canada, the world, whatever it is. And I wonder if it isn't the complete opposite. Narrow in on your community because your community has, city council, school boards, I'm sure MLAs, MPs that certainly function in a larger sense, but are on a small sense, you know. And I love the story of Lucrete.

Have you heard the story of Lucrete? I'm not sure if it's the one you're going to tell, but I've heard much about Lucrete. Well, you know, in the middle of all this, Lucrete is the lowest vaccinated county, community, whatever we're calling it here in Alberta. And the story that I've been told several times, so I hope I do it justice to lookery, is that, you know, when vaccines were first coming out, a young woman died there. And after that, they said, no more. And AHS showed up there, and they basically all protest and said, you need to get the hell out of here. And then what happened? Life moved on. You know, they can write any story they want about this horrific place. And yet, life moved on. And they protected one another and they banded together. That's the story I've heard now. Maybe it's been a little bit popular. I look at that and I go, okay, so you want to fix Canada, fix your community and maybe even take a Jordan Peterson idea, fix yourself, then start helping your community. Because if you could do that, find out what the levers of power in your community are. Instead of trying to figure out what's going on across the border or whatever else, when they come to try and put something in on you and your kids and your family and everything else, if you have a group of people that are going, we're not doing this and this is why. you know, a good portion of the population is just going to go along with it anyways, because they don't want to be bothered.

Yeah. And, you know, like, I start with yourself. That's exactly right. And this is where I challenge myself and my view of government comes from this. I am given, I found myself in this body. I have a responsibility to how a responsibility to myself only. for this body. It is my property, no one else's. Now, I do affect other people with what I do. And for instance, I brought, I was part of bringing two people into this world and I have a duty

to take care of those individuals before they can go off and take care of themselves. But that's the, it starts with the individual. But I would also say that what an individual is not permitted to do to other people, a government is not permitted to do to other people. So when you think what government is, it's like, Sean, let's say there was a third person here with us. And we just get together and we say, you know what, we are now, we're starting a government of the three of us. And then you and I have a deal the whole time that we're going to treat the third person really poorly. But you know what? We had a vote on it.

That makes it okay. It's there's there's nothing, nothing in this world that whitewashes the morality of any, in a moral government act against individuals. There's nothing. There's no crisis big enough. Nothing. If you can't take that action against another individual as an individual, you can't do it as the state either.

You can't do it under the guise of government or there's just a really pressing need. People need to start from that place. They need to have that sort of moral introspection that if I'm not allowed to go take my neighbor's stuff and shut down her business that operates out of her house, just on a whim because I believe there's a crisis, neither can the state. It's the same morality. Morality doesn't change just because of the size of the group of people

who have decided what to do. That is just, it's a deep moral flaw in the way we think. So it has to start with the individual. And, you know, it's funny that Ronald Reagan quote, I don't know if I've ever heard the full quote. That's really interesting because I'm fully convinced that political freedom is it's really a relatively recent phenomena. It came out of Europe or the Reformation and the Renaissance, probably some combination of both of both. But it's not the natural order of man.

It really isn't. And prosperity is not the natural order of mankind, that is. Like our species lives in abject poverty. And it's just moments have been punctuated in our history where we haven't. And I would say freedom is a moment in the life of our species. It's been a punctuation mark. And it is precarious because it is not the natural order of things. We have to work to keep it.

And that's that was what was, you know, that's the scary. various thing about all of this for me is how quickly we decided we could just dispense with it. And it was just fear. And you know what? Like if people were, I get sick of hearing saying this, but if you were scared, there was no reason you couldn't stay home and withdraw from society. You can do that now, now that the virus is no longer nearly as significant as it was. you can still do that now for whatever reason you want because we live in a free society so i i never understood at the beginning why our government it seemed like under the leadership of jason kerry here in alberta but maybe there was more going on the behind the scenes than was apparent

but i never understood why this idea that what the government could do uh was over okay when Jason Kenny acting as an individual, as a neighbor, couldn't have done those same things. There is a serious disconnect in ethical theory and morality there. And I'm

absolutely confident in saying our government behaved very immorally over the previous three years. Maybe they didn't behave illegally because at the end of the day that's what a judge decides. but they did behave immorally.

And that was my deepest disappointment in the leadership that we had is because I think most Albertans believe that we had someone with some sort of a moral or ethical spine. And that would have stood up to this sort of thing and found a different way. But we were only presented with two options all throughout. We were presented with, well, we can do nothing and then grandma will die. or we can do what we're telling you we can do. And it's the least restrictive that's plausible based upon experts in science and the priests

in white lab coat. And, you know, they did everything they could, everything they could to undermine the example of Sweden or much of the developing world or the Great Barrington Declaration. You know, Dina Hinshaw wrote, it's probably still on the internet government's website. Dina Hinshaw wrote a response, the Great Darrington Declaration. And it's like, I don't want to be too disparaging, but it's maybe high school level work. It's so bad. And if this is the level of analysis, it was just really a dismissive analysis.

Like, we're not going to do this. And here, look, we analyzed it and we can't do it. It's such shoddy, shoddy work. And people were satisfied at the time because people were scared. And I just wish we had leadership that had some understanding of morality and ethical theory. But instead, it seems to me, Jason Kenney included, they were all legal positivists where they thought the law made morality. And so they were perfectly comfortable doing things. things to us that were morally wrong.

It's, you know, it's tough. I, somehow I want to move past this, you know, I sat and talked about this for so long and thought about it for so long. I want to get to, you know, I don't, you know, I tell, I used to say this when I was, you know, running a senior team or, or when I was, you know, dealing. with different roles where I was overseeing people, I guess what I'm trying to say, is don't bring me problems,

bring me solutions, right? Like, let's figure this out. Let's move forward. It's been a long, a long sludge here. And certainly, you know, now that you got Daniel Smith at the top, you know, an election coming and, you know,

her doing things that I think are just well, long overdue. And now, and now the loud voice of the, opposers is just attacking and they're on full. And I'm like, I'm waiting to see, you know, because I, I was told Daniel Smith would never win the UCP leadership race. And, um, I just didn't see it. And given it was closer than I thought it was going to be. And now I'm told she's going to lose again in May. And I once again, just I don't see it.

If that world comes where what Daniel Smith is saying and doing and that gets voted out, I'm going to have a, I'm going to have a sad day after. Not because I think she's infallible or she's this perfect woman or anything. She's doing what I think a leader should do, talking about things, looking at it from different angles and trying to solve it. And learning for the last two years of maybe we don't want to lock everybody up again,

stick them with mass and force vaccine at it. That's what Ottawa showed you don't want to do. And now we're living with a bunch of the ramifications. I mean, I literally just talked to somebody, I can't use names, but somebody in the realm that deals with, you know, some of the underlying statistics on death, drug overdoses, suicides, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you understand some of the things that we as a media are not shining enough light on.

And that's some of the things that have happened because of what we did the last two years. Everybody wants to point out how bad the vaccine is, right? and all the mainly because for so long nobody would even admit you know how many times you hear that it's safe and effective nobody ever gets hurt from it that's a load of bullshit we all know it is yeah but now the other things that aren't getting talked about is the like the uptick and drugs not only drugs but drug overdoses and suicides and i would argue i hear this a lot suicides and young adults like kids and that is scary shit why aren't we addressing that We're not even acknowledging it exists there. I'm not talking about my audience. I'm just talking about government and overall media is not touching it. It's like that's a red hot coal right now. We've got to fix this.

Yeah. Yeah, I have no explanation. This is the only thing that I can think of. And this is not well thought through. I'll admit. But we could, but, you know, that's what a good, listen, this is what a good conversation is there, is trying to get a few things out of your head, then you let the audience stew on it, and then you can continue

to develop on that. That's what it is. Precisely. So I mean, when you look at, so when I started working with the CCF, I came in in 2009 and sad for me, I came in right at the end of the period where the media would actually pay for op-eds. So I wrote op-eds, national post, financial post, Ottawa, Citizen, Calgary, Harold, Edmonton, every major publication in this country. I've written it. I've appeared maybe some 200 times writing columns. I never got paid once for any of those. And if I was 20 years before, I don't know if the rate was, but maybe $500 per column, I could have almost supported myself for a while on that. But I missed out on that. But the reason I missed out on that is because of the internet. And so bloggers and independent

journalists just started giving it away for free. And kind of undermined. the industry, right? Because what does that industry do? Well, it provides content that people want to consume, but it's not paid for by the sticker price on the item, like buying a subscription to a magazine, for instance, or buying a subscription to a paper. Advertising pays for all these things. So, and I'm told it's mostly classified ads. So Kijiji plays a role. But it undermined the the whole business model of the print media. And to a degree, other media as well, it's had a bigger effect.

And, but when you view the media as a business that doesn't, doesn't really have a goal of portraying the truth, they want to spread popular things that will control attention. I want to control people's attention. Right. And their business is to, grab people and then sell ad space. They're an ad,

like the media is an advertising business. That's what it is, right? And so, you know, let your mind wander. Someone has paid the media for the opinion that it's holding on these things. That's why we don't hear about excess deaths. Excess deaths in Alberta,

we don't have data on it because they won't collect data in Canada. But here's the one, here's the, I 100% agree with you. What I find really hard to wrap my brain around on this one other than if they're being paid by somebody and they say strictly you cannot talk about this subject that is fair one of the things i said early on is why media won't let go that covid is horrendous is because it kept captured people's attention and in a dying industry like

you just pretty much put out there this pulled everybody back to news pulled me back to news i wanted to know what was going on so you went to her okay so now you have people's attention you go what's working because I have heard this. What's working? Well, people seem to be loving this talk about how lethal COVID is. Okay, let's give him more of it. So for a dying industry to hold on to what works makes complete sense.

What I do not understand, well, maybe I understand more than I give credit is one of the things I will never forget until I am deep in the earth is the road to Ottawa. we caught up to him in Ontario. So the convoy going through Ontario was something, and I've heard the stories of Winnipeg. I've talked to guys on the road through Saskatchewan.

I've heard about Calgary, you know, like all these different things. It is probably the biggest event that has happened, in my opinion, in the last 100 years in Canada. Now, to the old timers, I don't know what the end of World War II was like, World War I, I'm willing to give up that maybe I'm wrong on this. But in my lifetime for sure, and I would extend that to my parents' lifetime, there's been no bigger event than the pilgrimage from the west to the east. And I didn't see a single CBC camera.

I didn't see people just like media, just the only people in media were all a bunch of us independent people that have been like shadow banned and pulled from things and everything else. And I'm like, you want to get the attention of Canada. If you would have been on there, you would have had the highest ratings in Canadian history because people wanted to see it. Whenever there's a flood, whenever there's mass this, mass that, whenever team Canada wins gold, whenever media flocks to it and people flock to it. So in the last two years, I understand why they didn't get let go of the narrative of fear because everybody flocked to it. But one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in my life, they were not there. So that goes back to something very, very, very nefarious.

Because if we're going to give them that they're a dying breed and the only way they can make money is people's attention. And so that's why they stuck to fear. Well, that same theory should work for, man, there was people out everywhere on every single highway. You should have been riding with the truckers and filming how beautiful this was that people were fed up. Instead, they did the opposite. They framed it as this is bad. neon. I mean, they're making up all sorts of things. They did at the time, that it was extremist, far right-wing extremists. Then they tried to do something, which I think is incredible, if you think about it. They tried to paint it as crazy religious wing nuts, which all they can do is divide. But yeah, I don't know. I have no explanation for that other than, as you say, it's sort of a dark place, but I think all the people in the media, in my mind, I have some very specific

local Calgary radio and TV show hosts who are cowards. Frankly, they are cowards. They have been cowering. They have no spine left whatsoever and no credibility. But, you know, Richard Dawkins actually gives a very interesting, now I'm going to get this wrong. People are have to go fact check me and correct me. But in his in his original book where he discussed the concept of memes, where we get our internet memes from, which are really nothing like what Dawkins talked about. Yeah, memetic theory. Yeah, memes were to be a, or not contradicted, to contrast with genes.

Genes are little bits of data that are physical in your cells. You pass on to the next generation. Well, memes are ideas that function like genes and get. passed on. Honestly, for the listener, if you don't know what Derek's talking about, it's a fascinating topic, memes. What gets passed on for 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years, and it's not part of the body, their ideas or symbols or anyways, carry on.

So us, those of us in the kind of the freedom movement, always kind of joke that, oh, yeah, we're great at memes. Our dank memes are so great. But really, we pale in comparison to the real memeers. And the real memers are those fear peddlers in the media. And, you know, Dawkins pointed out that, you know what's even better than having an idea and passing it onto your kids? And, like, he, of course goes right to religion is this idea that you pass onto your kids.

There's no basis in reality for it. So what can explain it getting passed on, right? Because God's not real and you just pass this on to your kids. kids. That was his, my, my bad understanding of it. But, but he says, you know what makes a meme even more powerful? If you actually believe it. If you actually believe your meme, you'll be far more effective in passing it on, even if it's not true. This is where our media is at. The legacy corporate media, they're the real meme purveyors. And, The best way to pass on the meme is to actually believe the lie.

That is the most effective thing. So when I turn on the radio locally, and I'm not going to name anyone or name any radio stations, but it's just wall to wall, stuff that we know isn't true. It's stuff that we know is absolutely false. But, you know, my only explanation for it is it's more effective to actually believe. the lie when you're when you're the purveyor of the lie than it is to to actually know what you're doing is false because then you might have some ethical qualms of what you're doing but this allows people to live with the sort of live with the the the disconnect between what they believe and what they see too right like i i i i like maybe i'm really really privileged in the true

sense. I still haven't seen with my eyes and ears any impact of COVID, the infection. I still haven't. I don't know anyone personally. I don't know anyone who's passed away from it. I do know a few people that ended up in the hospital. I know some people that were very sick, but I don't know any, any tragic deaths. But I do know people who have died following vaccination. And I'm not going to say because of the vaccination, it's following. But, you know, the same thing could be said with dying with COVID, dying with vaccine. As a guy who was playing hockey with said a day ago, might be following the vaccine, but maybe it's time for us all to do a little bit of math.

Well, and, yeah, and you know, that's exactly right. And so, again, not to be a total, take this in a philosophical way, But there is a famous philosopher who I really admire for his influence named David Hume. He was part of the Scottish Enlightenment in, I'm going to get this wrong, my history is going to be bad. But 200 years ago, let's say. And the scientific revolution was going all around him. And people were talking about causation all the time. And he pointed out, well, we actually don't understand causation at all.

All we are able to see as humans is that event B follows. followed event A in time. And he used this famous example of billiard balls. And he said, yeah, you know, we we knock one billiard ball into another and we appear to see what looks like causation. We have no understanding of what that means and what happens. All we see is what he called the constant conjunction of one thing following another. And we were asked to put our critical thinking on hold all through COVID when they were saying hospitalization following an infection with COVID was a COVID infection or a COVID hospitalization. Well, that's just that's just that's bad thinking.

It's muddy. What about a COVID death is the same as dying with COVID? That's also muddy. But nowadays, we're asked to apply strict causation to the, vaccine where we have to prove it that's only a correlation we've only been working on correlation this whole time and so i have a friend where i live in outside of calgary who uh her awakening moment was in the i believe it was the summer of 2020 when her uncle who uh who crashed a plane was involved in a plane crash died of covid and so she she thought oh isn't that interesting so it wasn't the impact

with the ground. It was a COVID death. And, uh, well, and, uh, we've all heard, well, I shouldn't say we all, I've heard too many accounts of when somebody is sick or in the hospital where they do multiple, multiple COVID tests to get the positive. So then they can label. That's right. And anytime you start doing that, that's, you know, I'm not trying to slam healthcare workers. I try and say this all. all the time, right? Like, I think healthcare workers are amazing. Um, but there's some nefarious stuff going on that, uh, that isn't good. You know, Peter McKellow was just on. Uh, I forget how many episodes ago was Derek, but, you know, in the last week and a half. And one of the things

that has always stuck out, uh, stuck out to me about what he said was, you know, his claim is, if we'd used preventative treatment, early treatment, 85% of people who, uh, were hospitalized or died could have been, you know, essentially alleviated that. And I don't know, I'm like you. I don't know of anyone who died strictly from COVID, but I do have close, um, friends who were in the hospital and tell me of how bad it was. And then the thing I always at, I'm like, oh, okay, did you do anything prior? Well, no.

You know, they basically told me to go home and if I got bad, come back in. And it's like, we don't do that with anything else. You know, my kids start to get sick. you try and be preventative on it all the time because you're like, longer we let this go, where's it's it going to get, right? And sometimes they battle through. Don't get me wrong.

I'm not saying that you can't do that, right? A flu is a flu most times and, you know, you go through some things and then, you know, you sleep it off, whatever. But like a lot of things were preventative. This we went preventative treatment. No, we can't do any of that. Get it out of here. It looks like we tried to make it worse, right?

Like the H.S policy, my cynical view of it was, oh, you have COVID. Okay, well, go home, take some Tylenol and sleep. And, you know, you can try chicken soup, but we all, none of us, none of us sciencey types believe that has any effect at all. But, you know, you, you slubs who think it does, you can go do it. And if your lips turn blue, then you come back and see us. We'll put you on a ventilator, give you remdesivir, and you'll go in the failure and die, and we'll blame it on COVID.

Now, Peter McCullough is wonderful, and Dr. Pierre Corey is wonderful. Tass Morgan, I mean, it's very clear and very, very, very clear that there are therapeutics like ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, that do work. Will they save everybody? No. I think the best work on ivermectin shows about a 30% efficacy rate, but there's a swath of fraudulent studies continually coming out because no one who uses ivermectin says that you just give someone an ivermectin pill and it magically resolves like first off people still die with ivermectin

but it has to be part of a protocol it includes the proper dosage for weight it includes making sure that you have it with fatty food so it's absorbed into your blood through your gut and make sure that you have it with zinc because zinc is very important for it and you know there's other things like Quercetin, vitamin C, vitamin D. There's a whole... You're starting to sound like one of those quacky people, you know? Well, you know what? It's not quackery.

It is 100% true. I've seen it. I've seen it happen. And to be frank, that's why I don't have any people that I know who have died. Because everyone in Alberta who got sick was able to access these medications. And I can't tell you how, but we have... It was possible. Well, I tell you what, Albert.

Thousands of people. Albert, me and Mike Guzmiskis talked about this, the first time I had him on, once he was the CEO of I-Corps Blood Services. We talked about this like so early on. Alberta is a group and Saskatchewan, I'd argue. I would say a lot of the West is. I'm, you know, I feel bad for all the Manitobans because I always crap on them a little bit, in a fun way.

But grew up in Saskatchewan, now I live in Alberta. And I just see the, we're a group of people, give us. a problem. We'll stick a bunch of people in a room. We'll have a whiteboard session. We'll come up with eight solutions. We'll try them all out. And within like two months, you got your answer, right? And then you got billions of dollars because it's all private, well, it used to be all private business would fund it to get the solution they need it, right? Instead, we told them all not to think about this and just to hold on the government's got it under control. And you're like, oh, and by the way, that's Ivermectin you guys keep talking about. We're going to make it illegal.

And so then what happened? There was a huge run on horse Ivermectin, which then they tried to making fun of. And I'm like, you realize like a huge chunkier population deals with livestock and understands animals as good as anyone in the world. You're not going to fearmonger them into you can't do this. And so what happened? There was like this black market of Ivermectin that just happened underneath. Tons of people know the stories of Ivermectin. It's why it gets talked about so much. You know, one of the other ones that my listeners always stand by is Peter McCullough talks about um fluvoxamine is that it's there's one other one the one he's talked about was a mouthwash and nasal spray oh yeah because the virus lives in those and if you get

on that right away that can work better than anything and you're like bedadine yeah nasal rinse with bedding we didn't hear about i didn't hear about any of this nobody the only way i heard about it they like this is this is like this was suppressed information so i mean i i've seen suppression. I'm like, sorry, I use Facebook and my account's been basically frozen for the last two years because I post scientific studies on these things. Like an iodine or a hydrogen peroxide nasal rinse. What it does is that it knocks down the viral load in your nasal passages. And it puts it down to a manageable level so that you develop immunity. What is it, IGA immunity. And that immunity then protects you in your upper respiratory track. Now, see, this is very interesting,

because this is me now being a hack doctor and what little I know about immunology. The immunology that the vaccine is supposed to induce is called IgG, which is a sort of humoral or serum. It's deep in your body. But you know what? I was told by a vaccineologist, someone who knows those stuff. Before the vaccine program started with, he was basically, this is a vaccine that's doomed to fail because this is an upper respiratory track infection disease. They could stop it at the upper respiratory track, but they're choosing not to. They're choosing a failing strategy because there's more money to be made. And he just said it outright to me. And this was at the point where I was working with now Premier Smith on trying to get an Ivermectin or a therapeutics

challenge going here in this province, which we were unsuccessful at getting off the ground because it's too risky for doctors because the College of Physicians and Surgeons would have dragged any doctor admitting to this sort of treatment before an ethical proceeding and they potentially would have lost their license. Now, meanwhile, the FDA in the States was saying things like, good Lord, people, don't take horse medicine. You're not a horse, right? You remember this? It was tweeted. And then, you know, the meme purveyors took this up and very self-righteously went out there and said, you know, this is terrible. It was in the news here.

There's other ones, previously credible journalists who were falling prey for this. They actually believe it still, I think. But now the FDA has changed their opinion. Oh, it was only a recommendation not to do this. It was, like, they're rewriting history. But it's very clear. there there seemed to be some seem to be some

I don't want to say control exercise because I don't want to I don't want to give credence to conspiracy theory when I really don't have evidence of it because I think we can explain everything that's happened by people just being cowards and not understanding what's going on Jason like

does Jason Kenny have a science education Dina Hinshaw who was you know Dr. Dina Hinshaw who was, as head of public health, how many years in clinical practice of experience does she have? I mean, people should go look and convince themselves. How many patients has Dr. Dina Hinshaw seen in a clinical practice over her career? Well, one of the things that I think you hit on very well is if you, I don't have to say this

to my listeners, but I will anyways. But if you want to have your eyes opened on some things, go do some research. And I know they tell you not to do that. Like everyone's doing their own research. That's the wrong thing. Listen to the experts. Like, no, just go do some simple digging. Just simple.

I'm not talking about going down any, any, you know, just go look at, you know, lots of people talk about, you want to see what the world economic forums do? Just go look. They have a website. You can just, you can just do simple reading. You don't have to go down any rabbit hole. You can watch what they say and then see how it plays out. It's very simple.

It's no conspiracy. They want you to sit. make it seem like, oh, that's, that's crazy talk. Don't do that. But I feel like, you know, one of the most, uh, um, uh, aha moments. And I, this is coming from a guy who was interviewing all these doctors as I finally went and looked at Alberta's data, Canada's data, Sweden's, Florida's, South Dakota's, and I had one other one on there. It was like Minnesota or something. And just did the, did the work of like, mathematics in my opinion and I you know maybe for others that's a little difficult but just went

and looked at the numbers that was all publicly shown on their state or provincial order government websites and you're like oh it's like oh and that's hard to forget but either way here's your final question Derek I'll let you get out of here I know you can't give me all morning um it's a crude master final question it's he swords and he said uh if If you're going to stand behind something, then stand behind it absolutely. What's one thing Derek stands behind? I think for me, in the context of the conversation that we had, I think for me, what I want to say I want to stand behind most vigorously is the truth. And to have a deep and passionate desire to uncover the truth wherever that may lead and however unsettling that may be.

And I think for me, you know, all this conversation that we've had, book ended with this, or not book, ended with this idea, is that things could have been very different, right? This could have been a deadly virus. This could have been some sort of aerolized, like aerosol, Ebola that spread around the world. And it's, I mean, it's at least plausible. But it wasn't. But it could have been. I like to think that I'm the person that would have recognized that and not just had my own personal prejudices, which everyone has. But mine are to disbelieve, I think, and require further evidence.

But I'd like to think that I would have been led by the truth in that sort of circumstance. And I like to think that I'm the type of person and I want to be the type of person, where the truth is my utmost. goal. It's not what's popular. It's not what's easy. It's not what helps me sleep at night, but it's uncovering uncovering what's real and then applying that and returning to people that which was rightfully theirs. So in this context, I think that's what justice is, is returning to people that which was rightfully theirs. And in this case, I think what's rightfully, it's Albertan's birthright because we've decided for our children that it is, that birthright is freedom. And we need to return that to Alberts, both economic and personal

liberty, the freedom to make your way in the world and to do that with an eye to the truth. Because those are the two biggest casualties in all of this. First casually was the truth and the second was freedom. Well, I've really appreciated you hopping on. It's good to get, you know, the first time we had it, it was a different type of conversation around the Alberta Sovereignty Act. This being more one-on-one or being one-on-one, I shouldn't say more, is always my favorite. And it's funny how many lawyers I've had on here that get so philosophical, which is like right up my alley. I really enjoy that. And either way, I hope the listeners enjoyed as well. well. And I hope you've enjoyed it, Derek. And I appreciate you giving me some time this morning.

And I'm sure somewhere down the line, our paths will cross again. Okay. Well, thanks for this opportunity. I really appreciate it. I talk too much. It wouldn't be a podcast if the guest didn't talk.