2: The Crypto Coup?

Hi, I’m Jesse Hirsh and I’m here with my good friend Alan Gregg. And this is the Red Tory podcast, recorded live in front of an automated audience. And this is our second episode.

And I think today we’re going to touch upon tariffs and crypto and maybe a whole bunch of other subjects.

But because it’s our second episode, you know, we’re still gonna have a very laid back vibe in terms of it’s two golfing revolutionaries having a chat and trying to make sense of what’s going on with the world. So, you know, why don’t we start in general with the news.

Alan, what have you been looking at this week other than the obvious, in terms of what you think we should be talking about?

Well, again, as a Canadian, you can’t not be consumed with the issue of tariffs. I mean, the impact, 70% of, you know, all of our trade worldwide goes to the United States.

Our relationship with the United States, the supply chain integration is massive. And then also you’ve got the larger, I think, conundrum is that Canadians just don’t have a frame of reference to understand what’s going on.

And it’s not just the, the mindset of Donald Trump that is befuddling to, to Canadians, it’s the fact that that mindset is deemed somehow acceptable. Gwynn Dyer had a great line one time. He says, you know, Canadians don’t understand the United States because half of it is exactly like Canada.

You know, Boston is just like Toronto. There’s no difference. He says, the other half is exactly like Tehran.

You know, it’s backwards, it’s overly religious, it’s, you know, mired in superstition and acrimony and animus. And Red Deer is not like Biloxi, Mississippi. We don’t have any, any, any equivalence to that.

So the, the, the fate of poor Canada in the face of, you know, first the pummel thing saying, you know, our prime minister should be a governor and Canada should be a 51st state, and then just the sheer economic consequence and then at the third level, just the befuddlement.

Well, and you know, right before we started, you actually broke news to me, which is for now, these tariffs have kind of been punted a month to March.

Yes.

Did you get a sense as to the logic behind that other than it being a kind of a bully stick?

Well, I mean, I’ve always believed that this threat. First, there’s two levels of threat.

I mean, one is the transactional, immediate one, which is that I’m going to, on February 1st implement 25% tariff on all goods coming from Canada and Mexico.

The notion that this was as a consequence of our bad behavior in terms of the inflow of illegal immigrants and fentanyl is ludicrous because Canada’s contribution to those problems is 1% of Mexico. But we would be in the same boat.

The second tier is a much larger review of trade policy in the United States due to come out on April 1, and the two are linked.

There’s no question that the first 25% is leverage for the second, which is the larger review, which is going to be a wholesale re examination of the Canada U.S. mexico Trademark Agreement, an agreement that Trump’s administration negotiated last time and he called one of the best deals in the world.

But it’s obvious their intention is to not just open that up for renegotiation, but to renegotiate with a temper the likes of which we have never seen.

I think that things like Canada’s limits on foreign ownership, which we have in our entire banking system and our telecommunications system and our transportation system will all be up for negotiations never had been before. Supply chain management in the agricultural sector is going to be a dodo bird. It is going to be gone. We will not be able to sustain that.

Still have a free trade agreement with the United States.

And I think they will push as far as looking for a kind of a continental trade union, much like the eu, that would actually have a common currency on the table as part of that negotiation. We’re just seeing the first shoe drop.

Here, I think, and the pace at which these shoes are dropping, I think is part of what’s taking people by storm.

Now, one other example to this that I’d love you to unpack because you’ve had a lot of experience in the North American auto industry and where all the public dialogues focused on groceries and the impact that tariffs will have on consumer goods.

It strikes me the auto industries particularly vulnerable to these types of bidirectional border tariffs because their production process is distributed across the entire continent.

If these were to go through, what kind of impact is it going to have on the companies in Detroit and that have the manufacturing distributed in such a manner?

Listen, the North American automotive supply chain is so integrated across, across the three nations, I don’t know if they could even calculate a tariff because the average auto part crosses the border six to nine times. And that’s just how we make vehicles.

And if you don’t think that General Motors and Ford and what used to be Chrysler have got some continuing influence in Governments and lobbying. I mean, you’re underestimating just how much they’re going to be screaming bloody murder.

Which is why I also think for the very same reason is if the 25%, I mean, 70% of all our exports to the United States go to make other things that American businesses make. So that’s going to add to the cost of American business right away.

And that will lead to the hue and cry from all of these local US Chambers of commerce, you know, screaming to their Congress people about just how awful these tariffs are.

For at the time they had no kind of appreciation or full understanding of what that actual impact will be, much like as you suggest it would be in the North American automotive industry.

Well, and that’s why I’m partial to your narrative about the there’s an end game around a larger economic pact because the pushback has been large and the pain would have been felt, you know, by a lot of states, including red states, that could have backfired.

But I also keep looking at these moves as a logician because a lot of this just doesn’t seem to make sense unless you couch it in this larger kind of consolidation of executive power.

That the other to me argument for why this pace is so fast, why these guys are moving fast and breaking things, is because they’re trying to create precedent and you know, going so fast that no one could question the increasing authority of the President and the powers of the president.

Cuz the other story that I’ve been watching this week is Elon Musk’s seizing control of the purse strings, right, of taking the power that legally is supposed to reside with Congress.

But he, and it’s interesting, Anonymous leaked the names of the Doge staff, the young people working with him who now have the passwords for the Social Security system, a lot of the payment system within the government and Wired published it. But again, it’s inappropriate for the executive branch to have that kind of power.

And I’m waiting for the Democrats in Congress to say something about it because that’s where I’m seeing is a real change in the role of executive power in the United States.

Well, I think you’re absolutely right.

I think that, you know, that Trump was immensely frustrated by his first term in office, not just because he didn’t know how the system worked, but he believed the system was actually working against him and his agenda. And so, you know, tearing down those ramparts I think is clearly part of the plan. That said, you’ve got two big things working against him.

One is that you know, Americans enjoy chaos no more than Canadians. And this is chaotic. I mean, it truly is in an unanticipated way, that no one said, well, I saw this coming just the way it is.

And that that chaos will lead to. I mean, the very reason that he was elected was because people were so unhappy with the status quo.

Well, if they become more unhappy with the status quo because of that chaos, you know, his approval ratings will start going down very, very quickly. And this is a guy who lives by the stock market and his approval ratings.

The second is that we underestimate just what important guardrails are found inherently in our civic society.

And that isn’t just the different orders of government and the checks and balances in government, but it includes things like local chambers of commerce, in terms of the ymca, in terms of the Baptist church, and that people’s involvement. I mean, you sent me a TikTok video the other day, which you included on. On your. Your substack.

Here’s one I wasn’t familiar with at all, but she’s a fantastic soul singer, you know, singing stuff that came right out of the civil rights movement. And it’s a call to action.

And, you know, you see that sort of stuff happening at that kind of micro level, and then it starts to amplify and amplify and amplify.

You’ll see the same kind of resistances you saw to the Gilded Age at the turn of the century you saw against, you know, the establishment during the recession in the. In the United States. And it will. It will not wear well on Donald Trump and his. His concentrators of power in.

Because that will be a big, big target of the unhappiness.

Well, and I’m starting to hear kind of mention of what’s loosely being called an American spring for exactly that reason. There was a demonstration this weekend in downtown Los Angeles where they completely took over the 110. And it was very peaceful, but it was popular.

It was a lot of people sort of on the streets making themselves known. And what concerns me is the extent to which Trump and leaders like him need scapegoats, Right? And they need to blame things on someone.

And I kind of wonder. On the one hand, as you know, I love protests. I love mass movements. I love to see people in the streets.

Other disruptors.

Sure, yeah.

And talking, you know, much as Nixon did, you know, with the silent majority. You know, these people who are protesting in the streets do not represent middle America.

And the average person, the average person would say, well, yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s true.

So I mean, the dynamic now is very, we talked about this in our pilot, you know, that the yardsticks are not measuring the same things as they used to. And we’re in uncharted territory here, especially if we use the old yardsticks.

And so, you know, will public protest, will the spring, as you call it, you know, have the same kind of reaction as it did to, you know, in the 70s, or will it be something quite different that it might really inspire? I mean, again, we talked about young people. Young people are not right wingers by nature. They are just angry. They are mad. Really, really mad.

And if the right wing is expressing their madness, you know, a little bit better than the left wing, then they’re going to be echoing that expression. So, you know, we’ll have to see. But I think the notion that things will just kind of bump along as they always have, is completely specious.

You know, keep your eyes open, folks.

Well, and, you know, let’s evoke the kind of inner James Carville that lives in all of us. Where is the Democratic Party right now? How should they be playing this moment?

And I think we can all understand why they’re flat footed and kind of still going. I don’t know what’s going on, but at some point they gotta wake the fuck up.

Yeah, I think they’re licking their wounds right now. The big period of introspection.

I mean, you’re starting to see now the new chair of the Democratic caucus, Democratic chairman, again, you know, saying we have to get blue collar workers back. I mean, Franklin Delano Roosevelt would be rolling over in his grave. You said what? Republicans have blue collar voters and that is incomprehensible.

And in some ways it’s completely irrational. You know, how what blue collar workers have in common with what you’ve called the bro.

Oligarchy, you know, all of the people who are now glomming on to Trump is nothing, absolutely nothing. In fact, their interests are absolute, you know, loggerheads with one another.

And the other thing, I think, you know, the problem with the Democrats and the, we touched on this a little bit before too, and progressives is they Assume because they have no frame of reference to understand Donald Trump, that anyone who supports Donald Trump is a lunatic, and they treat them like lunatics. And the response is reciprocal. You know, you treat me like I’m a lunatic. Fuck you. You have nothing, nothing to do with you.

You know, over 80 million Americans voted Donald Trump. They’re not all QAnon, they’re not all crack brains, they’re not all, you know, siege the Congress.

These are a lot of people with very legitimate grievances that the Democrats have not been able to address.

It’s the guy, you know, who was a coal miner in West Virginia, who had two vehicles, whose kids are still living at home at the age of 35 with no prospect of employment and him now being out of work. And he’s just saying, who represents me? Who’s standing up for me? And the answer is surely not those Democrats.

Although, and I agree with you, there’s a second dynamic to this, and I think we could sort of segue to cryptocurrency as a tangible example. George Lakoff, who’s a brilliant psychologist. Linguist. Linguist, yeah, yeah.

And he talks about how you can have parallel circuits in the brain, that you can hold completely contradictory positions, but it’s often because they’re literally separated in terms of how you think about them. And I kind of feel that the maga right, has been separated from the rest of us from a media perspective, from a media experience perspective.

They’re listening, they’re consuming, they’re participating in an entirely different media ecosphere than we are. I think podcasting is the bridge.

I think podcasting is where there’s a lot of overlap, but other than that, even social media, now, X is going one direction, blue sky is going in another. It’s no longer the cliche of filter chambers, or rather echo chambers and filter bubbles.

It’s now the cliche of different social media platforms entirely. Right?

So actually getting to these people, and this is where the big tech is really leaning hard right into the Trump regime, because these people are very stable users.

They’re using Facebook all the time, they’re using social media all the time, versus who I think of as yourself, my parents, some of the other friends who would identify as anywhere from the center to the left.

A lot of you are still watching msnbc, you’re still reading the Globe and Mail, you’re still writing for the Toronto Star, and I understand why in terms of your values for journalism in a democratic society.

But we are going to have to go into new territory to reach those 80 million you mentioned, because they’ve completely disconnected and they will probably continue to disconnect from that mainstream discourse and are part of a completely different discourse of which I think crypto is a really powerful example.

Well, before we get to crypto, I mean, there’s no question there’s been a massive disintermediation of Q communications and the notion that there is a common experience like we used to have when we watched the last episode of MASH the Rich Data. But I mean, you know, or even, even super bowl game and it led to what we called, you know, the water cooler conversation on Monday morning.

I mean, you watched Ed Sullivan show and said, what do you think of those Beatles? And so you had a common ground right away there.

And there has been this intermediation that said, and again, it’s because the big generation is still a big generation. You know, legacy media still has a role. What’s distressing is that even the legacy media is becoming increasingly siloed.

How did you get, you know, a host who offers their view on the question before they ask the question.

And you know, that’s also, I think a huge problem in our understanding is that if you can’t go to a traditional source of authority, that is the news and journalists, and expect a more objective, impartial or at least balance.

And I know those are three very, very, very different things, point of view, then you really do end up, I mean, I’ve got a father in law who only watches Fox News. He would never know and he’s quite happy doing that every night of the week and just drinking the Kool Aid.

Although, I mean, I think because it’s our second issue, so we can be ambitious. Part of what we’re aspiring to do is stay out of those silos, right?

Is maintain a level of credibility, maintain a level of authenticity, even authority, but not through objectivity. I think we’re more approaching this from a humble subjectivity where we’re disclosing that subjectivity.

And that’s where I like our frame, that we’re researchers in the sense that we’re curious.

But we also as researchers have to at times say here as a researcher, how I might be Conflating my research or tainting what I’m doing, which I think is a much more accessible approach to an audience. Because you’re not abandoning that objectivity. Sorry, go ahead.

It’s not that you don’t have ideology, you’re just not in the straight jacket of ideology.

Yes.

And that’s why we’re red hyphen Tory. Yeah, you can see both things. If you’re thinking.

I gotta ask you though, on the point of the MASH and the TV moments, did you happen to watch the Jake Paul Mike Tyson fight on Netflix?

No, no, I didn’t. I gave it. I gave it a pass. But again, there was a joining moment.

I understand went up and it was absurd. As far as society of the spectacle goes, we could do better than that.

If we’re gonna have breads and circuses, our circuses need to be far more capable. But I’m curious, our last episode, we talked about crypto and that kind of influenced the post that I had on Substack.

Yes. Today. And you should talk about that because that was quite radical in terms of what your prognostications are.

I mean, the notion that there is an actual. I don’t call it conspiracy, that’s too strong a word.

But there is an actual plan to move to cryptocurrency as a more legitimate form of financial market in the United States.

Again, driven by, if not driven by Donald Trump, certainly abetted by Donald Trump and driven by others who are part and parcel of the crypto and bitcoin world. Talk to our listeners a little bit about that because it was fascinating.

Well, I’m really trying to come up with a sort of political economy, as it were, of crypto. There have been a lot of people who have been critical about it on a technological level, on a policy level.

But I just think about why is the US dollar worth the US Dollar? It’s because people buy and sell it.

And if you have more, like if you are the Federal Reserve and you’ve got lots and lots of dollars, then you can intervene in the market to keep the currency stable. And most people don’t realize that the bitcoin market, the entire crypto market, is heavily concentrated into a few hands. Right.

There are people who are like, again, the way the Federal Reserve or the way that the bank of Canada has an out sized position in currency markets. There are actors within the bitcoin economy who have even more outsized influence, but they’re individuals, they’re just people.

So they’re not subject to government policy. They’re not subject to scrutiny. It’s not transparent, but it’s not secret either. It’s kind of obfuscated. But here’s where I’m hypothesizing that.

In Elon Musk, I safe bet he has a very large crypto position, partly because Doge D O G E is a cryptocurrency that he loves, that he’s been championing for years. So of course he names this silly government initiative after the cryptocurrency that he wants to go to the moon, which is their slogan. Right.

And of course, he bought bitcoin or had bitcoin when it was pennies.

Now, before we get to the speculation, though, I mean, you cite in this article an executive order that I was not aware of that basically prohibited the state, that is the Federal Reserve, getting into this space. Tell us more about that.

So there is, and we mentioned this a little last episode, there is a threat that a lot of these libertarians fear, which is that more states start entering into their sandbox.

And in entering into their sandbox, creating rules, creating legislation that decides, well, only the central bank can engage in these digital currencies because the state has given it a monopoly, the way that states can have monopolies on violence or, you know, banking licensing.

And this was really, it was the libertarian side of the Republican Party that has gotten Trump over to the crypto and they said, we want to make sure that the government stays out, that they’re not allowed to be involved. And they also, as part of this executive order, removed any of the regulations that have been passed existing bitcoin.

Now, stop there, because I think this is hugely important because I know given your anarchist background, you tend to be a little wild and out there. If there’s a red on this side, it’s you more often than me.

And the notion that there is this kind of plot on the part of the oligarchs who own bitcoin, Bitcoin to become, you know, trillionaires, not just billionaires.

I don’t know so much looking at this executive order, however, that puts a very, very different picture on it because what you haven’t mentioned again over the course here, because it’s so obvious to you, is that bitcoin, unlike the money supply, is a finite commodity. There’s only so much of it out there, and so that the value, it is not a supply demand. It’s all demand because the supply is finitely defined.

The more demand there is, the more it goes up exponentially against that demand.

Which is why many people have called bitcoin a scam as a monetary system. But to be clear, you were the one who keeps using the word plot. I use the word political economy.

What bitcoin is, is a corporation that people have bought into. And if you have shares in a corporation, you are naturally incentivized to want to see that corporation succeed.

And the thing about bitcoin is that it has always been an ideological corporation.

It has always, in its founding and its support, had a libertarian view of society, that we don’t want government controlling money, that we don’t want any institution like Wall street controlling markets. And that’s why on some level, bitcoin is democratized, because it is like $1, one vote.

But I’m pointing out there are people who have a lot of those dollars, so therefore they have a lot of those votes. So it’s not a conspiracy, it’s not a plot, it’s a corporation.

And like, all this time, I’ve been seeing them have this very political view of the world.

And if you kept those bitcoins, you would be richer than you are now.

But the nature of being a revolutionary right is you have to. No, I regret it, but what.

Can you go ahead, stop there for a second? Because I’ve always discounted the. Not just the legitimacy, the longevity of cryptocurrency.

And the reason for this is the whole notion of currency, whether it’s paper currency or cryptocurrency, is an artificial construct. It doesn’t exist.

It’s a replacement for the old barter system where if you came and tilled my field, I gave you a cow, and you took that cow to the butcher, and the butcher gave you ten steaks and four jugs of beer. And the reason it worked, the barter system, is because you believed that the butcher was going to give you something, not turn you away.

They’re not taking bitcoin at Circle c or at 7:11 right now because they do not trust bitcoin. And what I’d always assumed, and I get the whole blockchain and the understanding that it’s a very efficient system.

In fact, in terms of accounting and what have you, that at some point in time, what governments would do is say, fine, we’re all going digital. You know, it’s a messy, stupid.

And once that happened, Bitcoin and all the other cryptocurrencies would be absolutely valueless. There would be nothing. That’s what I’ve always held your article today said. Hold on, smart guy. This is what they can do.

They can issue an executive order that says, no, you’re not allowed to do that. We’re going to keep this in the private sector. We’re going to keep this as a corporation.

We’re going to keep this as a finitely defined supply of currency. And if we should be scared of anything, that’s what we should really be scared of.

Because as you note in your article, the implications of that for world trade, for monetary policy all over the world is stunning because the American dollar right now does have that premise.

And it has that premise going back to what I was saying earlier, because it’s trusted, you know, that if you take an American dollar, someone’s going to give you the equivalent back.

And there’s two implications there. One, that they are deliberately trying to mess with the world reserve currency.

Yes.

Which is foolish on a policy level. But they’re seeing BRICS in the rearview mirror. Right?

They’re seeing Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, which is a growing international governance project. I’ve been listening to a bunch of podcasts on it. It’s really quite fascinating. And BRICS is gaining a lot of popularity in the global South.

A lot of popularity. It’s credibility.

So this is a way for, you know, not only for American capitalists to cash in by privatizing the world’s reserve currency, but by speaking to the elites of all this, of all those countries saying, look, you can’t trust your governments.

Trust us, the global corporation of capitalists who have created our own world reserve currency that no government ostensibly will be able to control. A debate I think we should have in the future. But my other point is this is your neo feudal regime.

Because those of us who have our savings in dollars, those of us who have, you know, are living in the dollar economy while these guys create the crypto economy, it then does create a two tiered economy. It creates a two tiered financial system.

Explain Something else to me then, and that, because, you know, this, this is new territory for Donald Trump. I mean, Donald Trump is older than I am for, for Christ’s sake.

I mean, he is not a cutting edge techno guy or someone who understands what this is going on.

How has he fallen so in the thrall of these guys, these Elon Musk’s and these Paul Thiels and Peter Thiels and, and this, this crowd who he’s now appointing to these kind of positions that are going to have authority over issues such as this, the use of cryptocurrency.

I mean, I think the obvious answer is graft. Like he did that Trump meme coin and then the Melania coin, which they both made a lot of money from.

So I think he understands that this is a source of income.

I think the AI stuff may be how these tech guys are manipulating him because AI is such a, you know, a meaningless yet powerful story that they could go, oh yeah, we’re going to build AI, boss.

Oh, don’t worry. In as much as it’s predicted to be a driver of productivity, a massive driver of productivity.

So I could see him, you know, and this is where I’ll say two things. I used to think that blockchain was legit, but the more I dug into it, the more I realized this is not how we would do digital currency.

I agree with you. We do need digital currency. We do need a form, you know, of online payment that is seamless.

I do think as an aside that Trump wants to go after interac.

I think they very much want to open up the Canadian banking market because interac, as a Canadian E transfer capability, is something the Americans are very much wanting to get into. But I think Trump cares about power. I think these guys see the long term game. I think they’re the ones pushing this.

I was being facetious when I talked about Bitcoin replacing the dollar, but I also want to be able to say I called it. So I thought to that point of, I’m going to come up with the most ludicrous extension of logic that I can on this issue.

And it’s not that ludicrous if you just think about people wanting to make money. Now, one last thing. We did get listener feedback from David Fingroot. Hey, David. And he wanted to reference a book for you, Alan, by David Graeber.

And I think it’s called the History of Debt. And I’ll send you the exact reference.

And in this book, David Graeber argues that debt came before Barter and anyway, it was an interesting argument, kind of went over my head. But I do want to encourage listener and viewer feedback. So please.

Well, let me give you something back then, David, because. Sounds like a non sequitur, but for me, one of the most brilliant people who are still alive is Margaret Atwood.

And her brilliance is not just in her writing ability, in fiction. I mean, the themes that she’s identified so far in advance of them happening in society.

I mean, I was called Jesse, you know, a genius techno cultural anthropologist. She is in a field all by herself.

The entire lecture series was about money and currency and what it is and what role it takes in literature, what role it’s taken in history, and it’s just sheer brilliance. So there you go back. You can read that, and I’ll read the. The book that you’re suggesting, the History of Debt.

Right on. Although be careful. We don’t want to get into a poker match with reading and our audience. They will outnumber us sooner rather than later.

We won’t be able to keep up with all their readings.

Oh, that’s wishful thinking.

Now, I do want to flag a topic for future discussion that I was thinking about when we were talking about the tariffs and we were talking about young people and trump. One of the things I’ve seen a lot online, and especially this weekend, is a kind of ageism, and particularly an anti boomer ageism.

And I want to unpack that, partly because we are labeling this podcast as intergenerational. And I think that would be something interesting for us to unpack and set as a thread moving forward.

Because I didn’t know the extent to which the White House was hiding Biden’s cognitive decline, but I was otherwise upset that they turfed him. Right. Like he’s a good human being.

There’s no question a good person.

Yeah.

And as the son of someone who practices geriatrics and has been arguing against ageism his entire career, I’m very sensitive to the idea that we cannot discriminate based on age.

And I worry that Trump is becoming a face for the boomers, that MAGA is becoming a face for the boomers, because I am seeing this come up again and again and again. Something I kind of want us to address.

Let’s talk about that, because, I mean, what I’ve said historically is exactly the opposite, is that what’s happened is that that big generation had been in the crosshairs of public life, you know, for their entire life. I mean, Paul McCartney was famous when he was 18 years old, and he’s still famous when he’s 80 years old.

You look at Polestar, that ranks the, the ticket sales for live music over 20, 24. 60% of the acts are over the age of 60. We have shifted all the social iconography in society.

We’ve redefined what’s old, we’ve redefined what’s young, and we’ve redefined how you’re supposed to behave when you’re at different ages. Mick Jaggers, he said, I’d never seen satisfaction over the age of 30 while he’s still doing it and he’s having affairs with 26 year olds.

I mean, how the hell did that happen? The notion that this might be starting to boomerang is something I haven’t thought about before. And so let’s go right on.

Now, do you have any. Before we end, do you have any thoughts about the federal election? Do you want to talk about the analysis you wrote for the Hub? Catch.

For those who aren’t old enough to remember that, I mean, the similarities are that much like Justin Trudeau at the time, Brian Mulroney extended his leadership kind of far beyond the best before date, resigned in literally his fifth year of his second term in power, and really didn’t leave his successor, Kim Campbell, sufficient time to rebuild the party. And they got destroyed.

And so anyway, the, the Hub reached out and said, you know, can you do a parallel between what was happening then and happening now? And in the piece I said, I said, look, there are a lot of parallels on the surface, but start with the start. That was 38 years ago.

And in those 38 to the Veyer premise of this, this podcast is that the world has been turned on its head in Canada in the 38 years, 10 million new Canadians have arrived on our shores. They have settled disproportionately in what become known as ethnic enclaves.

You know, significant enumeration areas that contain more than 30% of one identifiable ethnic group. And you go to Brampton and you know, all five candidates are Sikhs. You go to Markham, and all five candidates are Mandarin Chinese.

And that’s no different than if you go to Forest hill and all five candidates are WASPs. But it creates a completely different dynamic.

No political party has been able to win federally unless they’ve been able to capture that suburban new Canadian vote. We’ve talked on this show. The other thing that has changed tremendously is the mood of the country is just so much more negative.

1993 are coming off a recession, but it’s nothing like it is right now.

We were doing some focus groups last week, and as we do in these things, we often start by asking a question for which everyone’s got an opinion and there’s no wrong answer, just to warm them up to the conversation rather than getting into what sometime is the thick of thin things. And so the first question was, what these days are you feeling happy and optimistic about?

To which, over the course of six focus groups, a dozen people in each one, eight to ten people in each one, they just blankly stared at the camera for around 30 seconds. And then when they started to offer something, it was always, always in the future and borderline frivolous.

Well, I guess I’m looking forward to spring. The weather’s shitty here. I’m looking forward to a holiday. I didn’t have a holiday last year.

And then the second question is, and what are you feeling fearful and pessimistic about? To which the look of horror just, you know, overtook the expression of everyone who was participating in the thing? And the.

The answers were all present something that is happening right now. They were all massive in terms of global warming, world peace, and something that was completely and utterly beyond their control.

I mean, back then, the Liberals, the Tories had to literally fight three fights, reform in the Western Canada, Ontario and Atlantic, the Liberals and the new Bloc Quebecois at the time in the province of Quebec. Now you have nothing right of Pierre Poliev. And so the Conservative base is way, way, way higher, even if their ceiling might be a little lower.

They feel wildly underrepresented by the current political leadership. Since there’s polarization in Canada, it’s not at the electoral level, it’s at the political and party level. Conservatives.

If the Liberals can elect a Mark Carney type leader, as long as he didn’t look seen as two elitist, as long as he can fight like he looks like he’s a time for a change kind of candidate, someone who obviously is moving to the center, there’s maybe a little bit more fiscally conservative than the options that have been available to date to the center left, then he has a chance of pushing both the Conservatives and the NDP to the periphery and having some kind of prospect. That said, if I was a betting man, would I put money on that likelihood? No. Best political slogan ever written is time for a change.

And that sentiment is just massive right now.

And I am grossly disappointed in Jagmeet Singh and the NDP and the way in which they’ve been approaching. If Charlie Angus was their leader, they would be soaring in the polls.

But unfortunately they’re sitting on the sidelines on what is and should be Wab Canoe is another future potential federal NDP Prime Minister. He’s been very impressive. He has been absolutely shining. Go ahead.

And Singh will not run more than this, this election. This is his last election. But I agree with you. I mean, talk about again Red Tory. I mean the people who. I’ll forget that, that part of the story.

I mean, I don’t understand why the NDP are not significantly more radical than they are. Why they don’t go out, go out there and say, hold on, hold on.

We let Doug Ford freeze nurses salaries for three years, which as time passed was deemed to be unconstitutional. But forget about unconstitutional. Morally indefensible.

Yes.

Given that we have over a thousand people who work for the Royal bank of Canada who earn our. A million dollars a year. Yeah.

You’re paying nurses, you know, $45,000 a year when some knob who’s pushing, you know, wealth management accounts around, contributing nothing to society is getting paid over over a million dollars. Why, why shouldn’t we pay all first responders, all paramedics, all fire of people, all police people, all teachers, all nurses. 250 grand a year.

Yeah, yeah, start there, start there. And you know, people say, well, that’s not practical. Tell me why not?

Well, the opposite is we have devastated our healthcare system. Cause nurses have said, I’m out of here. Like my local ER department often closes on weekends because they don’t have enough nurses, fundamentally.

And, you know, Merit Stiles, I think, has an opportunity in this campaign to kind of show who she is. But I’m as equally disappointed with her and Bonnie Crombie as well. They’re kind of sitting back when Doug Ford is campaigning quite effectively.

But to go back to my rant is the fact of the matter is that we value the work that nurses do more than we value the work that hedge fund managers do. So why would we tolerate hedge fund managers to be paid more than nurses? There’s something a lot of our economic thinking, again, is crazy that way.

You know, if Exxon Valdez crashes on the coast of Alaska and spills oil that actually contributes to gross domestic product, you know, if you volunteer at a soup kitchen, it provides nothing. What do we value more? Oil spills or volunteerism?

Although I’m not sure I would continue to call it economic thinking. I think it is ideological.

And I think part of what we’re trying to do here on this show is kind of point out the things that are, at least to me, obviously ideological, but not to the rest of society.

And I think part of what we’ve done in our election and our policy discussions is we’ve been very narrow about the ideological options we should entertain. Now, a few things I want to say before I forget. You don’t happen to have Margaret Atwood’s contact info, do you? Can we get her on the show?

Show what a get that would be.

He is so smart. It’s just crazy. It’s just crazy. She always really liked me because her very first job was working in the phone bank of Gallup Research.

Right.

The fact that I was a researcher and so she and I always had.

It, I. I think it’s worth. I think it’s worth a Hail Mary.

The other person that I’m going to reach out to right away, who, who to this conversation, I would love to hear what they have to say, is Avi Lewis, because he is running for a federal election in Vancouver and he is. Yeah, he’s done a full 180.

He and I years ago, once had an argument where he was like, saying this about himself and Naomi, that they would never get into politics, that his parents and his grandparents were sacrificed to the political machine. He would never do it. And I think he’s just had enough. He realizes the climate emergencies, so he is running for office.

He’s very out there and he is pretty radical.

I loved his dad. I mean, one of the best public speakers.

I heard him one time and just sat there with my mouth open, couldn’t believe the passion and the concern and the work he did, both in politics and also as a diplomat was quite remarkable.

And the other thing that I want us to look at as a kind of recurring theme in future episodes is I want us to look at liberalism as an ideology. And I say this because in our lifetime I kind of feel that it got eclipsed by neoliberalism and neoliberalism became kind of the ruling ideology.

And I want to look back at both classical liberalism and what we can learn from it, but also where I like Mark Carney as a person and as an individual and he is right now the best of all, all alternatives. I’m not sure he has the right ideas, the right framework to challenge the things that we face in the future. And again, it’s not personal.

I think it’s ideological and I would love for us to pick that apart.

Well, in fact, let’s extend that conversation even beyond that and talk about not only liberalism and maybe even conservatism classically, but what are the new dimensions that are played that are creating a new ism that we haven’t really called. Yeah, because I mean, there is an understanding, you know, we, we know where liberalism and conservative came from.

It came from the Enlightenment period, you know, from the Edmund Burke’s and the, you know, the Mills and the Lockes. Well, a lot of shit has changed since then, you know, since the 18th, 17th century.

And there are new dimensions at work now that are driving people’s thinking in creating a new ideology and new ideologies that we haven’t really been able to classify in a way that helps us explain the world. And if part of our job is explaining the world, then maybe we should go there as well.

And you know, that I think quite conveniently brings us kind of to the end of the episode because I was hoping we would end on kind of recommendations on stuff we’re reading, links that I could throw into the show notes because one of the things, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this to you yet, but to your very point about maybe there are new ideologies emerging that we don’t understand that we need to wrap our head around. Have you heard of Curtis Yavin yet?

No.

So Curtis Yavin y A V I N and I’ll email you. He is the ideological guy behind Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and Anderson. And he’s on substack. His substack is huge.

And he is like the burn it all down far right libertarian guy who has replaced Steve Bannon because Steve Bannon’s field left out. Like Steve Bannon’s the guy who has the class analysis going. This ain’t good for working class American white guys. Right. Versus.

And no one’s listening to him.

No, no.

It’s remarkable.

And Curtis Yavin is the new Steve Bannon. He’s the guy who’s like the new. So I’ll email to you.

And then you mentioned that article I sent to you, which was, I believe, slate.com looking at Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibe and how they use substack to really swing to the far right and cash in. Clearly we were too late. We were a couple years too late on that.

Hopefully the pendulum swinging to the left and we’ll be able to cash in when it gets back to us. But it was an interesting article nonetheless.

Anything you want to recommend in terms of stuff you’re reading that you think our listeners should check out?

No, I got enough coming from you right now.

Right on. Okay. Thanks again, Alan. Any final thoughts before we conclude?

An hour’s about as long as I can take you on that.

Yeah, me too. My bladder actually only goes about an hour. This is the the issues with aging.

So there you go.

Thanks, everybody. Big shout out to Brian Trepanier, our first YouTube subscriber and loyal friend, old friend and Bill Fox, who sent a very friendly email.

And if there are friends like that listening, we want to get you on the show. So look forward to guests and whatnot in the future. Thanks again.

Till next time. Take care.