Shaun Newman Podcast - #832 - Tristin Hopper

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

Tristin Hopper is a Canadian journalist, columnist, and reporter for the National Post. He is known for his newsletter First Reading, which provides daily political updates, and he recently released his first book “Don't Be Canada”, critiquing Canadian affairs.Cornerstone Forum ‘25https://www.showpass.com/cornerstone25/Get your voice heard: Text Shaun 587-217-8500Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcastSilver Gold Bull Links:Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/Email: [e-mail] Grahame: [phone]Bow Valley Credit UnionWebsite: www.BowValleycu.comEmail: [e-mail] Use the code “SNP” on all ordersProphet River Links:Website: store.prophetriver.com/Email: [e-mail]

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Now, let's get on to that tale of the tape. He's a Canadian journalist, columnist, and reporter for the National Post. I'm talking about Tristan Hopper. So buckle up. Here we go. Welcome to the Sean Numa podcast. Today, I'm joined by Tristan Hopper. Sir, thanks for hopping on.

Thank you. And now, I know my name there. That's excellent. Did I get it right? You said thank you for hopping on. That's no one else is not of that idea. I'm like, crap, I got it wrong folks. No, I did a twos pun.

All right, fair enough. Well, normally I'd love to say that was where I was going, but that's probably how I do it every time and it finally just landed. Tristan, this is the first time you've ever been on the show. That's right. And I feel like I got to give a little bit of a bit of a bit back i got to i got to get a little bit of a backstory from you before we we get into your book get into uh your your new podcast get into i don't know election season the fact we're

less than two weeks away from uh whoever's going to be the new leader of this country but we get before we get all there how we start with just a little bit about yourself uh tell the audience who uh tristan is sure i'm 38 years old uh i am a man did you just turn 38 Yes. Or are you turning 39 this year? No, no, I just turned 38. Oh, the reason I ask. I'm an 86, so I, I'm a, I'm a, oh, oh, my spouse is 86. So she's older. Just a touch older than you. Anyways. 38 years old, male, born and raised Victoria, uncircumcised, left-handed.

Is any other details you'd like? Oh, I work at the National Post And I've worked there since 2011 As a reporter columnist for the National Post And then I'm here to shamelessly Pitch my new book Which is called Don't Be Canada One Country did everything wrong all at once

And of course I'm a podcast guest That's also something I do I was kind of curious on Did you always want to be a writer Or how did you fall into it? I don't have any other skills That basically describes and most other people in the journalistic profession.

I always trace it back to I was taking clarinet lessons at the Royal Victoria Conservatory of Music and I was going for my level two of the clarinet and it was about 10 years old and I read somewhere that as part of the examination for the clarinet, knowing details about the clarinet and sort of the history of the music could help you in your examination.

So I span about 80% of my time because I hated practicing the clarinet. It's a really wretched instrument. I just spent all my time reading about, you know, Tchaikovsky and sort of looking into the history of how you would, you know, actually turn a piece of wood into a clarinet. So I showed up just an expert on this, the background of the clarinet and how it came to be and how a read works and, you know, hadn't practiced any of the arpeggios. So I guess in hindsight, that was sort of the moment I realized I liked just talking about things rather than doing actual things, which describes most journalists. he showed up as an expert of the clarinet just couldn't play the clarinet yeah i couldn't play it and then i was sort of you know if you can ask me uh you know chikovsky wrote this piece very shortly after

pretty interesting he tried to kill himself multiple times uh he was uh closet or homosexual in saris russia a lot of his pieces in anyway i was telling this to the interviewers and they're like oh he really sucks at playing clarinet but he man for an eight year old he really knows a lot about russian composers. This has been already when you ask somebody, you know, just tell me a little bit about yourself. I've learned way too much in the best possible way in the shortest amount of time on Tristan Hopper. This is, this has been fun already. Let's fast forward then, okay? This election cycle, you've been, you've been writing for the National Post since 2011. Okay, so that's 14 years. So since you're 24, if I'm doing it,

doing my math correct you've been you've been really paying attention to the political realm of canada is that fair enough to say yes in those periods of time i've done a lot of reading about past elections uh so i i'd say going way back to john bren baker have a general generally good in your in you i'm well then i'm curious in your research or now your experience of the last 14 years of covering it on the weekly the daily this election what have we seen missing Canada before or is this something different? This type, I'd say the closest analog to this. And they're, it's actually surprisingly close to what is happening right now, would be 1984.

So that's when you've had Pierre Trudeau in government for way too long. And at the end, everyone hates him. And just before he's coming up to an election, he's saying, I'm going to lead the party into the next election, he takes his walk in the snow and says, you know, goodbye. The entire country hates him. And he's replaced with John Turner. And John Turner, who is not a member of parliament at that time, becomes prime minister and immediately leads the party into an election. So, you know, almost a perfect review of what is happening now. And this is exactly 40 years ago. And what happened in that election? The liberals under John Turner were

initially favored to win. And then there was a leader's debate. And everybody remembered, oh, it's just the same guy as the other guy that we hated. What a mistake. And then it led into the biggest, well, second biggest landslide of all time for Brian Mulroney. So Brian Mulroney, when he won in 1984, it's easy to forget because he got completely wiped out eight years later. but just a massive, huge landslide almost everywhere. So we haven't, by this point in the 1984 election, that trend was already underway. So I guess this one's different in that the liberals are still leading. But it's sort of, there's a few elections where sort of things change mid-campaign.

Most Canadian elections are quite boring. You kind of know who's going to win at the beginning and you just kind of go through the motions that polls don't change very much. But there are a few, 1984 being a great example, where they do go in unexpected ways because of things that happen in the campaign. So I'd say that's the closest analog to this one. But there's a whole bunch of things happening in this election that have never happened before. And I don't think have happened in essentially any other Western democracy.

The most notable being that young people are favoring the conservatives at rates higher than elders. So there's been periods in which young people have. lean to the conservatives. Margaret Thatcher had a plurality of the youth vote. Ronald Reagan had a plurality of the youth vote. Brian Mulroney, aforementioned Brian Mulroney, he had probably a majority actually of the youth vote. But to have an election in which the average 25-year-old is more likely to vote conservative than the average 65-year-old, that's never happened. And if there's an example of any other Western democracy where that was the case in an election, I'm yet to see it. yet to see it that is something it's it's an inversion it's like cats laying with dogs it's an

inversion of the social order you're supposed to be young and progressive and i want things to change and then you're old you're saying i'm old just keep it the way things are this is young people saying oh god can you please just take it to where it was you know when i was a teenager just stop with the things and you know take it backwards and you have old people saying no no no no no let's let's stay the course let's you know change up a few things i got i got more woke ideas to sort of burn through and that's showing up in the poll and recent abacus data um the strongest constituency for the liberals by far is the is seniors over 60 i think was 49% just massive plurality and then the strongest single age constituency for the conservatives is under 29 um

they got about 42% to i think the liberals 30% And what do you? These kinds of numbers are wild. What do you, what do you, do you, can you, um, simplify that down to like, this is my thought process on why that is? Sure. Um, it's just you break things so hard, um, that you're causing unexpected trends to show up. So my, my read of it is, if you knew nothing about Canada, you knew nothing about a situation.

And you were just sort of an alien looking in. And I just showed you those numbers. And you had some context as to how elections were. You could infer from that, oh, things have gone very wrong. Because to have conservative young people battling against progressive older people, something's wrong with your economy. Something has happened for that natural order to be flipped so totally. And I think it's just a reflection of the fact that, well, number one,

that young people cannot purchase homes under any circumstances. And number two, the average young person in Canada has very precipitously seen a decline in their country, which is very different than, you know, what the average 60-year-old would have seen, which is usually there are blips, but things are generally getting better and better and better. So you take the average person who is now 28 years old, their entire life has been each year crime gets worse. Each year houses get more expensive. Each year, you know, wage growth is stagnant. On every feasible indicator of things you can see, the country is getting worse or staying the same as everyone else gets richer. And if you're older, you already own a home, you already have a family doctor. Perhaps you've been insulated from a lot of these trends.

Curious your thoughts, you know, as two guys sitting here doing a podcast, how much is the change in the landscape of media, old versus young? how much does that affect it or do you put any weight on that? Oh, in terms of, well, we got a lot of new media, this election, such as yourself. So I think the argument you could have made as recently as, you know, even to an extent in 2021, that mainstream media kind of has a monopoly and, you know, the narratives they push are the ones that everybody's going to accept. I don't think that's the case anymore. I think that monopoly has very much been broken and you have large constituencies of people who are getting most of their news through podcasts, through independent media outlets, you know, by scrolling social media feeds. This isn't answering your question at all.

You were asking me about young people in the media? I look at young people and I go like, you know, in my time, you know, I've had to wrap my head around Twitter because I remember the first time Twitter. happened. I was like, really? That's what we're going to go. And yet now, where do I go to get, you know, to find not only guess, but just to get the latest breaking news. X is the easiest place to, in my mind, to go get what Tristan Hopper's saying, or I mean, how many different commentators, just go there. And people all say it's a cesspool. I'm like, I don't think so. I mean, if you go deep in the comments, sure, but you can literally go and see what is going on almost in real time. Boom. Oh, there it is. It's gotten more, one thing,

when we were first sort of checking the metrics, and I may be wrong on this, but when we were first checking the metrics on X, well, it was then notice Twitter. People never clicked the links. So you'd say, like, you know, you can promote your stories on Twitter, but people aren't going to click the links. So it's actually not going to drive page views. So if you're going to be using this social media platform, it's not going to raise your public profile. You can sort of see what public figures are doing. But, you know, journalists, and they all do this, just sit on Twitter all day. It's not going to drive people to the site and does not make you any money. I have seen that change where you will see,

we will see a story that is number one of that day. And it's because it's gotten a fair amount of traffic on X. So maybe that shows the shifting dynamics of who is on Twitter and X. People who are more interested in sort of long form. They're ready to click the links. They're ready to sort of read things. So it's actually getting less shallow than before, at least in my experience. Yeah, well, that would be my experience too. But there's, I don't know, to me, at times since Elon's taken over, it's gotten way better. Certainly there's parts where you're like, I don't know about that. But like overall, with not seeing every second day somebody removed for a thought has been really enjoyable,

which means you get, you know, now you're engaging more because you're not being fed. This is the only meal you get. You get this gruel. and that's it. If you step out of line, sorry, folks, you're, you're, you're removed from this. Because I, I've had plenty of guests on this that have, you know, certainly COVID was probably the, the lightning rod point where people would say something, that would get them removed. And that was how Twitter was going. And in, in walks Elon with X and changing the text. And all of a sudden, those voices allowed to speak, allowed to share their thoughts. And just naturally, I think, by just giving it an

openness to the platform. More people are like, oh, okay, we're going to allow some of this. I'm interested again. So, yeah, I think there's a craving and hunger for that. And that's, that's something I sort of found in my book, Don't Be Canada, is that, you know, you can, you can only sort of tamp things down so much until it kind of comes out in weird ways. So what I found most amazing about the modern media landscape is people's craving for long form. So, you know, the criticism through, you know, most of my life was, oh, it's just getting sound bites. It's getting dumber. It's getting dumber. It's short. It's quick. And then suddenly you've had this explosion of, uh, you know, like the leader of the opposition of Canada can give a 90

minute sit down interview with a psychology professor. And this gets millions of views. And actually, the biggest criticism of Pierre Polly of right now is that he doesn't do more of it. Like, at least in my circles, that's, that's a huge criticism. Why isn't he, why isn't he going, you know, Patrick, when Patrick bet David's calling him out, right? You're like, well, okay, Patrick, but I would love to see him do that with a bunch of Canadians, like right across the board. I would love to see him sit down and do 90 minute conversations with people and hosts from across Canada, not just Ontario, but people right across this country. I think that would be very fascinating. And to me, that's where I sit. Now, you go back 10 years, you might go, nobody wanted that. And maybe you have

insight on that. But I go, that's always been one of my criticisms of media is I want to actually hear the, I want to hear their thoughts. Maybe I'm a unique person, but I think the numbers now show that isn't quite the case. Yeah, maybe it was always the case. And we were just sort of assuming we knew what was best for people. So, you know, perhaps we, we, we, you could go back to sort of the early, early days of the internet in 2004. And, uh, maybe there always was a craving for, you know, slow television is what they call it in Norway. Like on Norway, their version of CBC, you'll turn it on and it'll just be six hours of a train going along tracks. And it's like, is that what you equate to this? Well, it's just like, you know, I want to buckle in. It's, you know, it's a nice,

train trip. But, you know, I'm going to buckle in and I want to sort of experience the whole thing. You know, it's the way I travel as the way my dad travels. So he'll go into a museum and just like, yeah. The greatest way to get criticism. It's that that was huge. Like, I mean, fair. I, um, a slow train moving moving. But it's a nice ride. It's a train in Norway. You're not moving through like, you know, Polish coal fields. You know, there's nice stuff to see. You're on a train. And yet, if I was on a train going through the Polish coal fields. The first time I'd be like, this is interesting. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Coles.

Right. I love Cole. I don't know where I was going. I just found that. That's great. Okay. You do have a book coming. I do want to bring this up, but I want to make sure we get to it because I love the, the, well, I'll read a couple off. Okay, your book, don't be Canada. Here's some of the chapters. Outdoing the Americans identity politics, the real estate bubble that never, ever burst. Harm reduction on crack, the Transing Canada Highway, a whiff of the Orwellian. What if we just stopped jailing criminals and then the world's most expensive free health care?

I thought, frankly, you got away with words. And I think it's what when I talk about having you on or getting you on with a lot of people and a shout out to Tews because he's been on me about this for quite some time. You have a way with words. And I think a lot of people will, I don't know, I'd be interested to see what your book's all about. Feel free to shamelessly plug. Oh, sure. Well, I can tell you, those chapters that you read out, my deal was it didn't get a chapter

unless it was something on which Canada was uniquely bad. So it's not just a book about like, here's all the things Canada is doing wrong. Because there's a lot of things that we're doing wrong at the same time everybody else is doing it wrong. So like we've run up a lot of debt. Everybody's run up a lot of debt, particularly under COVID. You know, we've completely phoned in our military spending and we can't defend our own borders. A lot of countries have done that of late. So those didn't get chapters.

So it had to be something in which I could prove that Canada has gone further than anyone else. And, you know, as a direct result is now having worse consequences than anyone else. So, which I think is quite surprising to a lot of Canadians, particularly you mentioned the last chapter, the health care chapter, because from birth, we're just raised with we have the greatest health care system in the world. You know, Tommy Douglas is a saint. Thank God for Medicare. And then when you actually find out that, oh, no, actually, we're, you know, trailing the rest of the G7 in, you know, surgery wait times. We are at the bottom of the OECD in terms of hospital beds and ICU beds per capita to actually find out that not only are we not the best system, but in many metrics as compared to our peer countries, we are the worst system. I think second only to the Americans, we are the most inefficient and that we pay the most to receive the least care in return. So each chapter is like that, which was all surprising to me, because I was.

thought as a Canadian, if we're doing some dumb thing on, say, drug policy, you know, we're just handing out bottomless opioids to drug addicts. There's probably some wussy European country who's doing an even more extreme version of that. And that's not the case. It's gotten to the point where we are doing things on harm reduction. We are doing things on assisted suicide. We are doing things on real estate on censorship, which even Europeans find a little odd. And that's something that's new. That's something you couldn't find, say, 10 years ago. But it's not a, it's not a tremendously partisan book. The word Trudeau is only mentioned about three, four times. A lot of these problems were already in place in Canada when he was elected in 2015. He's certainly accelerated a lot of

them. But if you want to fix this, this is something that's more in our bones than you would like to think. It'd be great if I could just write a book saying, you know, Trudeau wrecked all this. Trudeau's gone. It's fixed. But a lot of these, we'd already started to punch ourselves in the nuts. By the time Trudeau came and, you know, let's get two fists on those nuts there. I forgot to mention the first chapter, the easiest country to get euthanized in. Yes. Not in. Euthanized. I made up a verb. Oh, yeah, you did too. I'm literally not reading the word right in front of me. Thank you. I hate to, to, uh,

You know, like you're telling somebody about a good movie and then and then you give like the big shocking moment. You're like, I'm going to ruin it. When you go to wrap it up in a nice boat, right? Okay. When you say it's inner bones, right? You write all these things. Of late. Yeah, it's not, it's a fixable condition.

But anyway, go on. Is it a fixable condition? I think it starts with realizing that we are a country that can make mistakes. So I think that the theme that sort of emerges with all of these issues is, and, and sort of I speak to a few foreign sources, non-Canadians. And as soon as I tell them the premise of this book, that was really true, the bioethicist I spoke to for the Mayd Chapter. And he studied assisted suicide systems all over the world.

And as soon as I told him about the book, he's like, oh, I've been waiting for someone to write this book because I have no idea what's going on with Canada. He's like, I've studied this in the Netherlands, Belgium. And I thought Canada was going to be like an English-speaking version of the Netherlands or Belgium. but I found just a level of public trust, a lack of skepticism, which he said still kind of horrifies me. He said, I don't think I put it in the book because it might have been taken wrong, but he said, like, I've still got, someone mentioned Canada. It like shivers because he said when we were designing our assisted suicide system, there was just no idea in the room, no skepticism that this could go wrong and that bad actors could take it over it, which he says is just very different from how the Dutch or the Belgians or anybody else in Europe does it.

So I think our chief problem as a country is this idea, which we're really seeing, now that everybody's raw, raw elbows up, is this idea that we are the greatest country on earth. We can trust our governments. We are good people. We don't have bad actors. We don't have corruption like other countries. We, you know, pluralism and prosperity.

They are Canadian birth rights. They cannot be taken from them so they don't need to be maintained. Everything's perfect. If you criticize it, that's unpaid. patriotic, and this is just going to be the case forever. And just a lack of respect of, you know, a lot of these great things about us are not natural. You know, we have pluralism and tolerance because we have a very good immigrant. We used to have a very good immigration system which prioritize those things so well that it just

seemed like a natural component of the country. But, yes, this sort of national idea where we can't criticize the country and we have no imagination for how things could go wrong. this meant when you get a bunch of bad ideas, and these bad ideas are present all across the Western world, where they hit Canada much harder because we just didn't have defenses for it. We didn't have immunity. We had not been vaccinated against, you know, things like gender identity. So they were able to smash their way into the Canadian system much harder than even in the United States. Anti-racism, it's an American import. It hit us way harder and, you know, way more thoroughly

than it did in the U.S. It was just within a matter of years, it was woven into almost every institution and government agency from the top down, as the name of the chapter implies, to an extent that is just not seen in the United States. I don't know if we can pull back from this, but that being said, I have a different...

Well, we don't have a period of time in Canadian history. We've never had just an extended period where everything just really sucks, you know, culturally, socially, everything declines and sucks. So, you know, Brits have gone through this. Argentinians have gone through this. I think you have to grapple with the fact that your country really sucks. We did it to ourselves. There's no external reasons for this. And you have to start by acknowledging that's the case. As soon as you can sort of get out of this headspace that we know what we're doing and we're the envy of the world.

And we're not the envy of the world. That's also what sort of inspired this book, realizing that when, Foreigners write about Canada. It's no longer about the free health care and the thing on the backpack and et cetera. They're often sort of pointing to us as, you know, harbing. One of these eight, one of these eight things. And when I, when I look at it, I go, okay, the used euthanasia, use in Asia, that's a slightly different than assisted dying. I use them as synonyms, but that, that started under Trudeau, correct?

2016 the court case the court case which legalized it was just in the last days of harper so the court would have mandated it otherwise so they would have demanded um a assisted dying law which probably would have even under under the conservative probably would have resembled the first iteration of our assisted suicide law because the initial bill which came out which restricted it there was some some much more safeguards than there are now. And that was sort of a, I can't say bipartisan, but multi-partisan bill. Most people voted, most MPs voted for this. There was conservative support, liberal support, Black-Ka-W support, NEP support for, you know, that particular bill. So, yeah, I think even without a Trudeau, there would have been some version of the assisted suicide law.

And of course, that law was overturned by another court decision, which said, no, no, no, we were, we were so sweeping in the initial one, even these checks you can have. you know you got a mental illness you've got um just you know suffering with that's not terminally um you know read the original decision everyone gets assisted suicide you're getting assisted suicide you're getting assisted suicide everybody's getting assisted suicide that's right yeah but in latin i guess yes but uh yeah so a lot i mean a lot of these problems um well i'm actually surprised how many of these problems can be traced back to a supreme court Well, so this, I'm just curious about this.

So, okay, fair enough. So you're saying, albeit it came in at Trudeau's start, it was already the court cases were walking through of Harper's end, and it was going to happen regardless. And now certainly over the past 10 years of Trudeau being in, he has put the gas pedal down on this. It's not like he's been like, let's walk, let's back up. It's been like full throttle, let's go.

Yeah, it's just not fighting against these institutions. Was identity of politics at the end of Harper as well? Yes, there were sort of, actually, GBA plus. This is sort of a system under which a gender-based analysis plus. So this is a new, you know, sort of bureaucracy within the federal government in which every piece of legislation that comes out, including the budget, they do gender-based analysis. So, you know, the budget comes out, and then you send it to your GBA people. And then they just do little write-ups about whether this will disproportionately impact women or men. With one notable exception, they haven't done it on gender ID things because they would probably determine that it's actually quite bad for women.

You know, for gender. But there's no GBA plus on that. But that system was actually implemented by the conservatives in the final years of Harper. GPA plus, there's none of that on what? I'm forgetting the exact piece of legislation, but this is something I've heard from Gen. or critical feminists, they say, everything gets a GBA plus analysis in which you say, oh, you know, this particular budget measure, as regards, you know, fishing. Sure.

How is it going to affect women? Yeah, most fishers are men. So I would say this is a 60% male policy, although, you know, women eat fish, et cetera. So you read these, I mean, you read these analyses. You're like, what does the purpose of this? This seems really. Ridiculous, but carry on. And it was sort of, it's the beginning of, you know, we should.

analyze this through, you know, a gender lens and through a racial lens and through a decolonized lens. So it was sort of the first first step on that sort of escalator of national hand-wringing was brought in under the conservatives, GBA Plus. But anyway, the criticism I've heard is that, yes, GBA Plus has not been applied to, say, gender ID laws in which they're, you know, we changed from, I guess the system we would have had 10 years ago is we've had legal transgenderism rights going all the way back to the 1970s. But prior to the self-ID era, you needed a doctor's note, you needed evidence of surgery. There was sort of an institutionalized process by which you could legally change your sex. And then that was completely changed. It was already,

it was already underway in Ontario. So there was sort of early laws, 2012-ish, in Ontario, moving towards self-ID. But yeah, definitely over the past 10 years, it became institutionalized across Canada that there is no institutional involvement now if you want to change your legal gender. It's just you sign out the form. It's actually one of the shortest forms I've ever seen within the federal government apparatus. It's just like our current spigender and you sign your name. I forget what the what I forget what question I was trying to ask. Oh, yes. Well, the GBA identity politics. So there was even there was even moves towards, uh, any politics under the conservative.

So you name of your policy and there's a wild to me. Maybe you have a thought, I don't know. It's wild to me when you, when you're looking at any specific policy. And the thought is like when you talk about this being in our bones, like as a culture, it's funny to me. And maybe this, you know, maybe I, I'm completely off base on this.

But it's funny to me, we go, I wonder how it's going to affect women. I wonder how it's going to affect whatever racial background. instead of is this going to be cost effective like maybe we should like is putting this there or doing it there like is this going to be the best use of taxpayer money or however you want to put it you know i watch the americans with doge and you can love or hate that in in in its entirety but like they're walking through and going scorched earth on a whole bunch of things and i i hear that and i go when you look at canada what you're telling me is we look at well i want to

how it's going to impact women. Is that, is that, like, I can already hear, and, oh, well, we better send it off and we better do this instead of going and spending probably way too much money on just that study alone, instead of going, is this a good thing for Canada? Like, as a whole. Yeah. And that, that sort of change, that cultural change in which, I mean, in the, I think it's the identity politics chapter, in which I point out, when you look at, I contrast two studies. So there's the Truth and Reconciliation Commission final report, which you actually read it, and there is information there. This is sort of a comprehensive history of Indian residential schools, very good research, witnesses who have never spoken to any sort of commission. I mean, you read it,

and you're like, this is, this is all here. This is a work of scholarship. This really illustrates the issue. And even gets into some of the controversy. I mean, they mentioned, you know, some people had pleasant memories of Indian residential school, not the majority. And, you know, there were teachers within the system that we consider good people and we're trying to do their best within a system that we now see is quite damaging. So you read that report, which is sort of a model to the rest of the world. If you have something in your history that you're not proud of and you've got to work it out, you just get a report like this. It's sort of lays it all on the table. It's readable.

It's not full of academic jargon. And any normal person can just download it, pick it up, read it. And what? And what, sorry, sorry to interrupt. If somebody wanted to go read it, what are they, what, I assume they just Google it. Oh, yeah, truth and reconciliation, final report. Final report. There you go.

Carry on. And so you go from that. So that, that dropped in 2015. It was already underway because remember, it was Stephen Harper who did the apology for Indian residential schools and then set the commission in motion. You go from that, just a few short later years later into what you would assume would be a similar report, missing and murder. an indigenous women. That is a shockingly bad report. It is just there's no investigation. There's no new analysis. You read through the report. I mean, my jaw was on the floor as you're reading through it and you're like, when are you going to get to the part where you're analyzing,

you know, why there are disproportionate numbers of indigenous women? Who is killing them? I mean, and all of this is in the Indian residential schools. There's, you know, reports. Here's where the children died. Here's where we think they're buried. Here's what they died of. Here's the schools, you know, charts, graphs, maps. None of that is in the MMIW report. And you're reading it and it's just full of academic jargon. You know, through a gender lens decolonized.

And you get to the end of it, they've spent tens of millions of dollars. Nothing has been accomplished. And there's an entire side. I mean, most of what we know about this report is the part where they just declare Canada guilty of ongoing genocide. And then you read the case for that and it's ridiculous. They're essentially saying, yeah, by the traditional standards of genocide, it obviously is not a genocide. You know, it's not the government of Canada sort of ordering, you know, outsized crime to be committed against indigenous women.

However, we're going to sort of rewrite the term genocide through a decolonized lens. And under this one, it's kind of is an ongoing genocide. So, I mean, a few short years, you go from a country that is working well and can grapple with uncomfortable issues. better than almost anyone to just gobbledygook. And it accomplishes nothing. The rate of indigenous women being killed is exactly the same now as it was then, if not a bit worse, because they made zero attempt to actually address why it was happening and solve it.

It just became an excuse for a bunch of academics to talk about ongoing genocide, dust their hands and say it was done. So that comes up quite a lot in the book, things that we used to do quite well, quite recently and we just suck at it and it's completely taken over by activists and it does not work under any definition of that word so when you fast forward to where we're sitting again because if people hey if people want to go buy your buck amazon i assume is the best place yeah amazon i think they're sort of back ordered um the uh good problem it's sold out it's sold out it's a good problem to have we actually have to go cut down new trees to turn them

into in the books. We run out of the raw materials even to make the books. So Indigo as well or Sutherland House books. You can buy directly from them and they will eventually get it to you. So if all of these fail, if it's so sold out and you can't get like a black market version, which there are ways to get that as well. Sutherland House will eventually get a book to you. Or there's an e-version and the digital age is limitless.

So if you want to read it immediately, just put it on your kudos. Oh, there you go. Are you doing an audiobook? Yeah. Yeah, I was, it turns out I was speaking into the wrong side of this microphone. So I already recorded a good chunk of it before the audio, my audio editor said, yeah, remember we had that discussion about the microphone being the wrong way around? So, you can get in touch with me and have a really crappy version of the audiobook. I could just send you that, you know, right now.

But anyway, yes, the plan is I actually have a lot of visually impaired fans, I think, because they don't have to see what I look like. So I've gotten a number of people saying, I can't read. Can you please record the book? Well, I just think in today's day and age, you know, I can't read like on a Kindle. I can't do it. I don't know what it is. I just don't want to stare at a screen like that and read. I'd rather have a physical book in about 15 years.

I was a very early adopter of Audible. Well, the thing about Audible is, is you get the right voice on there. And it's fantastic. Like it is fan, freaking fantastic. I love, I love audiobooks. I still like the physical as well. There's something really in, I don't know, beautiful about having like that. Well, I mean, you can see behind me.

There's something that I really enjoy about the hard book, flipping the page, everything. You know, it goes back to my childhood and reading books from very young age on. But Audible has been, you know, here in Western Canada. The amount I used to drive for sure, even now in a long road trip, you just flick on an audible book. and the drive is extremely enjoyable. And there's a lot of roads out here that I've driven a lot where it got pretty mundane. And as soon as I stumbled on to audiobooks, holy,

it just, you know, it just created a whole new experience for a five-hour road trip or whatever, you know, just doing moment there's, you know, doing something. Well, doing the dishes. Well, doing the dishes. Oh, yeah, the dishes. Yeah, well, it makes it enjoyable. Nobody bugs dad while he's doing the dishes

that he's listening to his audio books. Perfect. That's right. So you fast forward to where we sit right now. Okay. I'm going to come back to this election. I'm looking at your book. I'm looking at all the things you've written about.

All the you've dug into this and you go like it's inner bones. But you still said we could, you know, different countries have went through these dark times in their history and have found their way up. So you fast forward to this current election. Tristan, who's in your mind? Where do you think it's leaning towards for a prediction of who's? who's going to win this thing? So I should, you know, my caveat of this, all the available polls and indicators that we usually watch to cite these things at this moment are all saying liberals. So, you know, the poll aggregators, and that's two separate. That's PollyWave and 338 Canada.

And also, I think, almost more critically, the prediction markets. So Polly Market. Polymarket, yeah. They all have to say Polly at the begin. Polymarket is, there's been about 40 million dollars wagered just on one, you know, who's going to be the next prime minister? And it is favoring Mark Carney. In spite of all that, if there was an election that in which the momentum was going to change late in the game, because I think most Canadians, there's another thing that comes up in the book, a lot of Canadians are just really tuned out with politics. And I think that's a natural consequence of until very recently, we have lived in a country

that was very well managed. You know, we would stumble into a sovereign debt crisis. We would stumble into the Great Recession. And the people in charge generally knew what they were doing and got us out of it without, you know, too many, too many issues. So if there's any country that is complacent, we are extremely complacent. I think it is very logical that we became complacent because we have had a number of elections in our history in which you had moderately competent guy over here and also moderately

competent guy over here. and they're kind of, you know, pitching the same thing. And it doesn't really matter at the end of the day. Whoever we pick the country is going to work. Actually, on the night of the 2015 election, it's probably the dumbest thing I've ever said. So before I give you my election prediction, all the other important journalists were busy. So like some all-night Israeli radio had no news. And they said, well, let's get someone to talk about the Canadian election.

And they asked like, what do you think is going to happen for Canada? And I said, you know what? I don't think much. It's Justin Trudeau now, but it's Canada. We're going to have things are moderately the same. It's going to be well managed. There's going to be people who care about the country. And, you know, it's going to be through a liberal lens and a conservative lens, but we're still generally going to do the right thing. And that was wrong. Obviously, in a number of ways, it is visibly worse than it was in 2015. So anyway, the point I'm getting to, a lot of Canadians are super checked out.

And so I think more so than your average electorate, they're not really paying attention until the last two weeks of the campaign. So I think a huge weakness for Mark Carney is he wasn't a politician two months ago. So he's an extremely unknown quantity as compared to the conservative leader. People generally have an opinion already baked in for him. And then it isn't that hard. It's not inconceivable that once people say, start paying attention to politics, start talking about it, actually watch the debate and pay attention to them, they may not like what they see. And you could see, like I mentioned in 1984,

everybody's all in on John Turner. Let's just, you know, they change it up, they got rid of Pierre Trudeau, and then the line was in the 1984 debate. I think it's almost public domain, so you could almost splice it into the podcast if you do those types of things. But the line, the knockout punch in that 1984 debate was on his way out the door, Pierre Trudeau gave a bunch of just plum positions, I think it was 200 sort of patronage appointments. And then those were re-uped by John Turner. So he got in as the new prime minister and sort of approved all these just naked patronage under Pierre Trudeau. And then Brian Mulrity, I'm going to plug the exact line. But, you know, John Turner said, I didn't have a choice. I had to do it. And then Brian

already says you know if anybody's familiar with this line they'll be screaming at their headphones right now because i'm going to screw it up like you did have a choice mr turn or something like that so that's considered the like everybody changed their mind and the polls the next day showed a 10 point collapse and the liberals 10 point rise for the progressive conservatives almost overnight so um if that was going to happen i think it's much more likely to happen in this election than almost any i can think of in recent memory because carney is such an unknown quantity and is an extremely flawed candidate in a number of ways. And I think the liberals are acting that way,

that this is as short an election as it can possibly be. It says 36 days, so any shorter than that, and it's unconstitutional. So they're leading this election from the standpoint that the longer people look at Mark Carney, the more they will not like him. So people are going to be looking at Mark Carney more than they ever have, probably in their entire life, and that probably won't go well for him.

I could be wrong, but if I was, you know, telling conservatives, if I was trying to, you know, tell conservatives why they shouldn't lose hope, given that every single poll is against them, it's that the circumstances for a momentum shift in this election, I think, are much higher than almost any other election I can think of. in the final two weeks. Do you think the NDP are tanking on purpose? And the reason I say that is, I mean, one, they're broke, right?

So they're riding around the bus and that isn't a reason tank. I just mean it's quite evident. But the, you know, the porn star, the pictures with the furries, and on and on and on and everything, everything jag meat. Or is it just like, I know, no, I think that's charitable. That's very kind of you to think that. They're doing it intentionally. I often fight with people about this where they say, you know, Justin Trudeau is scoring up the country on purpose. You know, it's a W.E.F. Agenda. He's sort of

working with it or, you know, Jugdine Singh is doing it and everybody's, everybody's really smart and they're doing all these things on purpose. I think, yeah, I think they're really think they are trying their best and this is all they know how to do. There's another theme of the book. It's pursuing a horrible idea. The idea immediately makes everything worse. And you, you say, okay, well, let's do the horrible idea, but like doubly so. And that makes it doubly worse than it was before. And you just keep going with that. It is sort of an interesting psychological study. If you were an NDP supporter last election and you've watched everything Jagmeet's done, at this point, are you voting NDP, liberal, conservative, not voting, Maxime, Block, like, where are you sending your vote?

that show that you're just shifting to the liberals because you realize, you know, you're cutting out the middleman. You're like, well, I voted NDP the last three times. I just got liberals anyway. So why don't I just vote directly for the liberals? So I think the NDP, I've always thought, what is the NDP floor? Because every party has a floor where they can do whatever they want. And at a certain point of time, there's just people who, you know, they've got early onset dementia. They think it's 19. 1984, they still think Jack Layton is alive and they're just going to vote for NDP and it does not matter what you do. And I think we're seeing, I always thought it was maybe 11%, but maybe it's sort of more 6, 7%. This is just, you know, retired shop steward hasn't picked up a newspaper in 30 years.

It's just, oh, it's election time. This is when I vote NDP. I'm not dialed into any of the particular issues. So I think, yes, the NDP is scraping their floor. I didn't think it was this low, but I think they're absolutely scraping their floor. And anybody who has any sort of agency or awareness is either not voting or is voting for the liberals. When it comes to politics, the more I watch it, the more I see the anything to, anything to win, the dirty. I don't even know if it's tricks or just it's a dirty game. The latest one is this button, this button gate, right?

Liberal staffers leaving buttons at a conservative rally getting caught. The buttons were what, well, getting caught after the fact by a CBC reporter, if I recall correctly. Which is a game for reporters drinking. So she was drinking. drinking with them and they're like, hey, you know what? So we took these, this is, this is, this is just my dramatic reenactment of it. Yeah, we went into a conservative conference. We handed out all these buttons.

And now people are going to think they're like Trump. And she said, I am a journalist. I'm going to report this. This is, you know, in as official CBC language as possible, this is what she said. She's like, you just admitted to not quite a crime, but you just admitted a electoral crime to me. I'm, I obviously have to report it. And then according to the story, he's like, oh, I was just kidding. I didn't say that.

So anyway, it was Kate McKenna. This is why, if you're following the campaign, it is your duty as soon as your shift is up to just drink yourself to death. On the off chance that some partisan admits some incriminating thing to you. Is this shocking to you or you're like, oh, no, all sides do these things? No, I wouldn't say all sides do these things. I think it is. Yeah, a level of dirty tricks. maybe they will next time because, you know, what if the conservatives do lose?

I've often thought, how do you get, you know, a figure such as Donald Trump, who just, you know, has no respect for democratic norms in a campaign, we'll just say anything to win. And you get it by, in the U.S. example, you have Mitt Romney, you know, the most bland milk a toast, you know, we're going to run a clean campaign. And then he's just chewed up by, you know, attacks from the other side. and then you know the response of the republican electorate is okay well you didn't you know we we sent in a really obnoxiously nice guy and he was just called a racist and everything else and was just eaten alive um so we're going to send the opposite of mid romany we're going to send you know just a

maniac who says whatever and cannot be stopped um so maybe that wouldn't happen in the canadian context but you know you could see an example in which the conservatives lose and their conclusion is if we had been as ruthless and dirty as the liberals, maybe we would have won. So I don't know. If this starts a snowball in which both sides are just absolutely, you know, chewing through politics and fighting dirty in the next election, you know, it would be good for people to remember where this started. You think a Trump-like character of winning Canada?

No, it's always, the Trump character is always going to be different for each country. A long time ago, I read a story nobody read, and I'm still mad at people for not reading it, in which I tried to imagine what Trump would look like in different countries, because your sort of dyspeptic populist is always going to be unique to your country. Trump is an extremely American figure. So you can have a Trump in Australia, in France, but it's not going to look like Trump. It's going to be French Trump. It's going to be slightly different.

And so I was just calling up, you know, national experts, political scientists, all around the world and saying, you know, what would your Trump look like? And, you know, if I called up a South American country, it was very easy. They said, oh, we've had like three trumps in a row. This is, you know, this is a very normal leader by the standards of South America or, you know, parts of Africa, et cetera. So I was trying to imagine what Canada's Trump would look like. And my conclusion was, um, it would be, you know, sort of someone who was just, you know, lock up the criminals, you know, cut immigration, um, you know, kill the foreign aid, uh, you know, consulting the, uh, uh, you know, consulting the, uh,

Yeah, insulting, well, a bit more energy than Maxine Bernier, but, you know, insulting the appearance of fellow candidates. But I thought what was unique about Canada's Trump is that it could be like an old gay Chinese grandmother. And I don't think that could be true of many of the countries. So we could have, you know, it's there's no, there's, it could be from a demographic group, potentially you wouldn't expect in the realm of dyspeptic populist. Hart Trump could be an old gay grandmother, Chinese grandmother. I think, yeah, I think there's a non-zero chance that if things continue to get worse and people get more radicalized for, yeah, I think if you're going to have pissed off Chinese grandmother, you know, elected prime minister, I think it's more likely here than almost anywhere else, except maybe China. If I go back to your election prediction, if I were to summarize it, I think I, I, I think you went right now it looks like liberals, but and a big butt because we do have the national debates this week.

If there was ever a chance for a knockout punch, that would be the time where things could dramatically shift. So if you're conservative, don't lose hope because obviously there's a lot of turnout issue. So conservatives are doing really well among youth and youth typically don't show up. for elections. So a lot of these polls are sort of based on, they're looking at prior elections in which there was no very low voter turnout, some of the lowest in our history for 2019 and 2021. So, and you don't really need to gin up voter turnout too much to dramatically sway the results. So, yeah, if you see sort of the polls being wrong, and the polls have been wrong, They were off by five to six points in 2011.

That was the year that the conservative won their majority. So at the end, some of the final predictions, they have the general trends rights. But yeah, there was a Nannos poll that was two days before election day, off by six points. So that was sort of a surprise conservative majority. And it was definitely a surprise that all of Quebec decided to vote NDP overnight, making them the official opposition. So, yes, there can be a. surprise result. So yeah, I think the big unknown here, and we've seen this to bring up Trump again and to bring up several sort of European populist elections, is you have a whole voter demographic who

have spent the last three, four elections, perhaps their entire adult life saying, screw it, why do I vote? It doesn't make any difference. And a lot of those people, you know, are probably going to vote enthusiastically this time because there's been any number of instances over the past four years in which it has been made clear to someone who was normally very politically apathetic. Oh, actually, politics do affect my life. I remember when this park didn't have a tensity in it. I, you know, I remember when I wasn't smelling crack smoke on the bus. And, you know, I have listened to some podcasts and I have concluded that perhaps my earlier votes or failure to vote may have contributed to that. So, yeah, I would say there are elections in which you just kind of go through the motions and we

kind of know the winner by the end. That was certainly true in 2021. This isn't one of those. No, because, yes, you could see, I mean, if you only give, if you get a voter turnout, equivalent to 2015, 2015 saw a lot of young people who didn't normally vote come up to vote Justin Trudeau, and they completely abandoned him in 2019 and 2021. So he had to sort of consolidate. I mean, he lost a lot of seats. He had to run minority governments.

And, you know, eventually you just saw the only people voting liberal or old people now. So if you have an equivalent number of people showing up for Polyev that showed up for Justin Trudeau in 2015, you know, change election. I don't normally vote. I'm showing up. That could upend a lot of these polling models. Now, the pollsters are trying to sort of account for that and they're waiting youth vote more to sort of account for that. Abacus data is sort of trying to put in voter turnout. But yeah, I'd say sort of get out the vote if a lot of non-voters show up.

Um, you could see unexpected things happen on election day. You like or hate polls? Like, are you a guy who looks at the poll and goes, hmm, that's interesting? Or you're like, eh, take it with a grain of salt. Oh, I, you can, I both, I, I, I push both buttons. Um, yeah, they're, they're always interesting. I cite a lot of polls constantly. So if I said, I didn't like polls, it'd be a huge hypocrite, which I don't object to.

I'm quite hypocritical on many things. Um, but, um, yeah, any poll is, uh, never. never put too much hope in, you know, one particular poll, but you can sort of get a sense of trends. I mean, I bring it up a lot in Don't Be Canada, just because of every once in a while, you will get a poll that is like shockingly, that's a great way to identify 80, 20 issues. So this is something you've heard a lot in political discourse. I'm not sure if you've mentioned where you have a policy that 80% of people basically agree with it. And then the 20% who don't, they get all the attention. So I can think of a few polls just in the last few years in which we've taken issues

that in the media landscape, you would assume we're controversial, but when you put it to the polls, you figured it's an 80-20 issue. So that's an extremely valuable thing to know as a journalist and, you know, I assume as a policymaker. One example, I think there was a National Post-Commission poll. We asked people, you know, you like transgender rights and, you know, 80% of people say legal equality for transgender people. What do you think about a system in which a kid as young as six years old can, you know, say they feel like they're a different gender and the stated policy of the school is to immediately affirm that and they can't question it and keep that a secret from the parents if the child requests, which is the policy across most school boards. And that was 79 to 80% said,

absolutely not. And, you know, these are otherwise very liberal people in the transgender issue. But that was one thing in which that is a bridge too far, you know, after years and years and years and years and years of Canadians being sort of early adopters of gay and trans rights. We're not down with that. So you ask me if I like polls. Yes, every once in a while you'll get just a blowout result in points. Well, the reason I ask is, you know, recently there's, you know, well, actually, I shouldn't say recently. It always, if it favors the conservatives, liberals say you can't trust the polls. If it favors the liberals, the conservatives say, you know, it's like back and forth this idea can you trust the polls this idea and you know most recently would be probably the

u.s election i think they showed uh democrats winning and then of course that didn't happen and so like i go can you trust the poll i just i guess that's my the reason i would say my opinion has been i don't think they're wrong so i don't think uh i think they are sort of a semi accurate assessment of where people's heads are at. But that doesn't mean they're an accurate predictor of what is going to happen. So I guess I would say, yes, if you have a poll two weeks out from an election and it shows 44% of Canadians would like the liberals as compared to the conservatives, I think that is an accurate assessment of how the country is thinking, you know, give or take a few percentage points two weeks out from an election day. But or the reasons I mentioned, that could change in the next two weeks. Yeah, well, no, I appreciate it.

I think you have an interesting insight on when we're looking at the federal election and things that are, you know, are coming real fast. I mean, like, yeah, because when it shows up, think of any number of things in your personal life that when it's far away in the future, you're like, oh, yeah, I could totally do that. Yeah, I'll get a gym membership. Every week, I assume you work out, but I'm just talking for the great, you know, mushy, middle of us. Oh, I signed up for dancing lessons with the misses. That's good. And then as the first dancing lesson approaches, you're like, I actually don't like that at all.

I'm going to try and think of an excuse not to go to dancing lessons. I think elections are very similar because a lot of people are starting like, oh, I actually have to vote now. I have to go to a building and I have to wait in line with a bunch of old people. And I have to cast my vote. Isn't that sad? Like, that is about as low of a bar as you could set for any human being. Just go put a thing on.

a piece of paper. No, I'm very pro not voting. If none of these parties are speaking to you, you know, you stay home. No veteran's going to be crying. That's, that's totally fine. I do not sign on to this thing that everybody should vote. I think, yeah, if you don't feel catered to, just sit it out and save that vote for when it really matters and you can be the non-voter that changes things. You know, I don't, I'm not particularly dialed into sports. I'm not, you know, I'm not, I have to cheer for a team. But sports is different than politics, by my mind. Sports, yeah, sports doesn't affect.

You know, if you walk through our conversation, one of the biggest problems with Canadians is how uninvolved they are. Yeah, huge, huge problem. Yeah. So to me, this affects every Canadian. So to not vote, if you go under, maybe you're trained to thought of like, listen you've looked at everything and you're you know i would argue that the best thing you could do is go sit in line and and uh screw up your ballot right so it's it's it's i have spoiled the ballot

it's very thank you spoiled the ballot i use the proper wording here and spoil your bout i to me if you're like nobody speaking to me i think that'd be too many canadian aren't paying attention are just like bah i'm not really into politics anyways i'm not going to go vote i don't i'm fine with that person sitting out so if you think i don't think canada changes in their direction. Okay, you just sit, because some people are voting and they're thinking like, this is my last chance. Like, I own a business in the downtown core. If things don't change within the next year, I got to shut it down and there's no future for me. So that person is very invested in their vote. I'm, you know, I'm fine with you just leaving the election decision

to that person if you don't think it's going to change in either direction. So, you know, if you really see no difference between the two parties. I'm almost inclined to say it's patriotic to leave this to someone who is more dialed into what the outcome could be. And I would argue that get dialed in, like get dialed in. Like I mean, oh yeah, buy my book and be dialed in. That's what I should be saying. That's probably what you should be saying. I would argue get dialed in folks. It's true. Yeah. It compared to, yeah, I'm afraid we have to be more like Greece, in which we just assume our government is stupid and we have to watch what they're doing before our government is stupid you have to be dialed in you have to pay attention you have to watch things you have to

read things you have to be dialed in the days of of just being like well it doesn't matter a country doesn't matter or you know it's going to go you know milky whatever one way or another i don't know what example i'm trying to say i'm not tristan here with all the the clever but i think that's sort of an organic process taking place i think there's a lot of people who uh Like me in 2015 thought, man, it's generally going to be the same. You know,

there's, it's going to be a well-run candidate with liberal or conservative characteristics. I think a very lot of Canadians within the past few years have noticed consequences to how they vote in ways more flamboyant than they ever could have imagined.

You know, be that elevated crime, be that they're applying for a grant and now it's asking them, you know, what racial characteristics they have so they can decide whether to reject the application. Be that watching the

maid program. Be that the free drugs. Be that the criminals getting out and over and over and over again. Be that all these things. Be that the wait times for healthcare. You go down your list of eight things. And now knowing that you didn't just, you didn't pick out things that were, you know, the debt.

Well, everybody's got debt. Right? The way you put it, I'm like, hmm. So you picked out eight things. Not two, eight. that we're absolutely horrific at and leading the way on horrific. Yes. Yeah. Finding new and more creative ways than anybody else to do it badly.

And this is a service we've provided to the rest of the world because non-Canadians can also buy this book. And this is a very helpful guide we have created for you on how not to do these things. It costs us a lot of money and lives, but those need not be your money and lives. before I let you out of here I'd be remiss if I didn't ask Canada did what you got a podcast we talked about it on the show I can't remember

forgive me on your start What? Correct. Sorry. Well, how long ago did you start it? Because we talked about it on the live show. Oh, thank you for talking about it.

Yeah, it was my editor saying you're always bringing up weird Canadian and it was us signing onto this trend of sort of recent history and we sort of broke the rules a bit in that. We've realized there's a lot of podcasts and Netflix series about you don't take distant history. You took something that happened 20 years ago, like the OJ Simpson trial. And it's like, you thought you knew everything about this.

But there was a whole bunch of stuff that you sort of missed in the reporting of it at the time. So you just sort of revisited in depth. So it was supposed to be our version of that with a bunch of Canadian issues. So you thought you knew what happened in the October crisis. But here's really happened. So we're putting together another season. And I think it's going to be more. recent stuff. I sort of, some of the stuff got too far in the past, 1950s, et cetera. So I think we're

going to do another season that will be stuff that happened in the 1990s, more recently, that even younger people would, would remember directly. So like the 1995 referendum, which came very close to Canada having, sorry, Quebec having a mandate for secession. And what we now know, this is bananas, the premier of Quebec was going to, you know, unilaterally declare independence the next day. And God knows what would have happened from that. You know, could have gone real sideways real quick. Or the debt crisis, you know, a period of time where Canada was, you know, cited as, you know, a third world economic basket case.

And very quickly, we climbed our way out of it. So I don't know, if you have any particular suggestions of things within your living memory that you wouldn't mind hearing, you know, dissected in depth on a podcast, please suggest them. well mine mine isn't in living memory i want to know about uh uh the f lq the the the where they kidnapped um oh i did that's the canada did what has an entire one hour episode about that it does does it oh yeah yeah yeah folks i'm i'm talking i'm talking i'm right yeah i take the very yeah i take the very controversial view that when you actually look at because i think the standard canadian view of it is oh you had like two two students got too excited and they kidnapped these guys and then the federal government overreacted and marched the army into Montreal.

When you actually look at what was going on and how the FLQ had been around for quite some time. The FOQ is called, forgive me, October crisis is the FOQ. That's right. All right. Well, shows how long I've been staring at these things. I read, sorry, I'm like sidetracks. I'm like looking and up, I'm like, how did I just skim over that? Oh, that's the best episode.

Yeah, you'll be. Well, I open with. Okay, go on. No, no, no. I, just to me, you know, when you look into, you know, when was the War Measures Act used? Why was it like all these things? What the heck happened? Bombs are going, you know, like you're like here in Canada.

That's interesting, right? Like to me, as a guy who likes history, who now is, you know, not recently. I mean, I was thinking about this morning. It's been four years of talking politics now or the general theme. but you know compared to uh tristan it's it's a short time compared to you know i look at the length of your background and digging into things um but the like the more you start to dig into things the more you're like this is this is pretty wild why isn't this and maybe it is maybe i'm completely wrong on this too but i don't remember history class in or social studies i guess in high school

talking about the f lq or anything to do with that and yeah i read about it and i'm like way more interesting than it's given credit for 100% like there's a ton of stop that's gone on. You're like, holy crap, that is fascinating. And it inspired the, if you know the 1970s, this is shocking. There was a bunch of crazy underground terrorist movements running through the United States in the 1970s, the most famous being the weather underground. And this was almost every day or the one that Patty Hurst got caught up into, the

Symbionese Liberation Army. So you had all these like just nutty left wing terrorist armies holding up banks, blowing stuff up almost every day in the United States. All of that was inspired initially by the FLQ. So once the October crisis came to an end, you know, a lot of FLQ members ended up in the States and said, let me show you how to build a bomb. So, you know, indirectly, we created the underground bombing wave in the United States. That was essentially a Canadian export. Don't tell them. That's, you know, great, not great for us. But yeah, we, we, we constantly. a lot of chaos in that particular decade.

Not me specifically, but Canada. Well, yeah. To me, Americans, when they don't know anything about us, and then I hear that story, I'm like, well, you probably should. Because the amount of mayhem we can create if directed in the wrong way, or if we go the wrong direction, which I literally read off your list of chapters, and I go, we're heading the wrong direction right now. It's pretty crazy how much influence we can have on our southern border.

Oh, yeah. Although, I mean, a couple of those are very much American exports. So that's them exporting the chaos to us. So I would say, yeah, when it comes to sort of anti-racism and sort of, you know, race-based quotas, oppressor, press dynamic. That is very much. Yeah, that's, that's, that's, to an obscene extent to the point where you actually have government documents in the government of Canada, they didn't even change the text. They just said, like, we have to grapple with the legacy of slavery. which it's Canada we don't really have much of a there was some slavery but 4,000 total African chattel slaves over the 200 years of colonialism as compared to millions millions upon millions in the United States it's just different histories and yet you'll still find documents published by government of Canada saying you know we are still Canada's racial dynamics are exactly the same as the United States we still have the exact same legacies, which is just obscene. We were racist against different

kinds of people here. I mean, no, you know, if you're going to be anti-racist, at least figure out who we hated as compared to who the Americans hated. It's often very different. Sir, appreciate you hopping on today. Thank you. Yeah, hopefully, well,

hopefully you've got to cut down a few new trees. The environmentalist won't like that, but hopefully the book sells continue to go strong. I know twos who eventually, I hope you'll meet. You'll come the mashup with us and be a part of the live show. He's a big fan. I know there's others. Either way, appreciate you hopping on, give me some time today. And we'll look forward to seeing what you're right here in the days to come in the next two weeks. If nothing,

it shouldn't be dull, I wouldn't think. No, no. Very exciting. Pay attention to what's happening in your country. Stop watching CNN.