5: A Coup in the U.S.: Implications for Canada and Beyond

Hi, I’m Jesse Hirsch and I’m here with my friend Alan Gregg for the Red Tory podcast, recorded live in front of an automated audience. And today we’ve got our first guest, Armin Yalnizian, Canada’s foremost economist, as part of the Government in Waiting.

How long that government has to wait, we’re not so sure.

But we’re here today to talk about the political crises that we’re in, to talk about what it takes to win the electorate, shift the electorate to the left. I mean, we have spontaneous conversations, as it were.

Although, as a kind of current affairs driven podcast, I always like to start by throwing to Alan and saying, well, Alan, what have you been paying attention to, especially given this crazy news cycle we find ourselves in?

Yeah, I mean, a couple things you really can’t ignore.

One is just the flood of court challenges that’s going on against all the various executive orders that Donald Trump has put forward, everything from funding freezes to, you know, dismantling organizations. And that’s predictable. What isn’t predictable is almost the. The casual laissez faire response from the White House.

You almost get the sense that they are actually going to try to ignore any court rulings that go against them. And when that happens, we’re in absolutely uncharted water. So, I mean, that’s obviously very interesting and very troubling.

The second thing is, and it’s one of the many head scratchers out there, is that this whole notion of Canada is the 51st state just is not going away. And again, Donald Trump seems to be the only person who takes this serious.

But the extent to which he comes back again and again and again and again to this trope makes you really wonder if there’s something way beyond what we’ve discussed already. You know, a leverage negotiating tool for the upcoming renewal of the Canada, U.S.

mexico Trade Agreement, or even the prospects of a, you know, negotiating a customs union or something. Or is there something really, and I don’t want to sound conspiratorial there, but something that. That none of us have really talked about.

So those two things have been kind of, you know, consuming me over the last 40, 48 hours. Armin, what are you watching? What have you caught your attention the.

Last little bit on February 1st, when we were told that the terrorists were going to be brought in, and then we were told no, we had to wait for a month.

And now we are being told that today we should expect tariffs on steel and, excuse me, aluminum, that will affect mostly Canada more than anybody else.

We’ve been told that it’s 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum for any import into the United States, but most of what they get, most of what the Americans import is from Canada. I started thinking about what’s the play because it isn’t just about tariffs, it’s about something bigger than tariffs.

And to your point, Ellen, of you know, him referring to Canada as the 51st state repeatedly, there’s something going on that is a bigger play that feels to me given that a lot of the boys that are in the treasury right now that are writing code are known Russian assets that maybe what we are looking at is something that sets up at the moment a tripolar new global world order. Where there are what Trump is doing is saying you only need to pay attention to one source of power in the Americas, and that’s me.

And that is absolutely a replication of what Putin did in Russia and Russian sphere of influence and Xi in the Asian sphere of influence.

And when you said earlier, Alan, that this is something that we’ve never witnessed before, you know, normally there’s one node of power, but here’s these at least two, maybe three nodes of competing power for power’s sake. And I do think this is a, you know, what’s going on in The treasury is J6 the inside job.

I think this is a coup and it’s not clear to me whether it is a Trump led coup or a Russian led coup within the United States. So I think something much larger is at, at play. I mean, you were afraid of sounding conspiratorial. I am too.

But I cannot read it any other way other than this isn’t about, this isn’t about tariffs.

That’s the territory we end up going with all of this kind of chaos. That’s lots, lots to unpack.

And plus, I also really want to get because of your special role that you’ve occupied for so long, I really want to talk to you also, we both want to talk to you about what the Democrats have to do, especially to get back blue collar workers. But before that, my understanding is Jesse has been the thing that’s really caught his attention is Kendrick Lamar in the.

Super bowl in part because of how political this particular moment is. And you know, the, the super bowl last night obviously being the kind of circus part of the breads and circuses.

And technically it was the most secure super bowl ever.

And there was really interesting protest that actually if you look at it was part of the halftime show performance, even though it wasn’t shown on the actual Television. And, you know, to back up a step. On the one hand, you know, Kendrick Lamar as, like this Drake diss, as kind of the surface level meaning.

But this was actually an ode to Gil Scott Heron. And the revolution will not be televised, right?

And out of the 15 minutes that was played, there was about five or six songs that he performed snippets of. But the key one from his album is this song called TV Off. And the refrain is, turn your TV off.

And I’m pretty certain that he wrote this song after he got the gig for the Super Bowl. Cause there’s two hooks in the song where he yells out really loud, mustard, which is the name of the dj, the producer who put it.

And the first one, he’s saying, I’m doing this in Compton, and then I’m doing this in New Orleans.

And he started off, so Samuel Jackson is playing Uncle Sam, and he’s talking about this game, but it’s the game of politics and it’s the game of power. And he keeps talking about it in that frame, even though it’s sort of done as a video game.

So there’s this powerful point where Kendrick Lamar is looking into the tv, looking into the camera, saying, turn your TV off. Turn your TV off. Right? Starts with, the revolution is being televised. Ends with the revolution is not being televised. Turn your TV off.

Turn your TV off.

And that’s when this person who was part of the performance, because this was the most secured football stadium ever, and I watched multiple angles of the person who stood on his grand national, his car that is the symbol of the album, and held a big flag. Free Palestine, Free Sudan, right? This huge flag.

And held it for like, maybe 10, 15 seconds, at which point security went after him, did the thing that streakers do, you know, running all around the field till they caught him. But this was a member of the cast of the performance, and everyone who was around them knew what was going on and stayed in character.

So it really reframes how they did this performance in front of Donald Trump, in front of all the people watching. And the fact that he had Crips and Bloods, like different parts of kind of criminal America in the whole performance, dancing together.

I took it as a ray of hope in what is otherwise, to your point, a very scary time. And I feel a little inflationary. I’m usually the conspiratorial one. And you guys have both literally trumped me in this regard.

Pardon the pun. Pardon the pun.

But. But to. To. To affirm both of what you’re saying.

I kind of feel that American hawks are part of this because they’re saying, we’re facing China, and we’re facing China for rare earth minerals. We’re facing China for AI, we’re facing China for, you know, geopolitical military competition.

So we need Canada, and we need the resources that Canada has, and we cannot take the risk of a hostile regime being in Canada. And we’ve already seen what they did to us with TikTok. So, anyway, I digress. Go ahead, Alan.

No, no, that’s interesting because it feeds right into what Armenian is saying now.

What you’re trying to say, Armin, is that in order to have this tripolar world that Trump is looking for, Canada is an important part of buttressing his poll. In this exercise, we saw that Justin Trudeau had a summit in. In Toronto. And while it was kind of economics, he’s in Europe now.

He’s in France right now.

And while it was supposed to be off the record, he was recorded as standing up saying, I believe that Donald Trump is completely serious about this and cited very specifically, he wants our critical minerals. What do you make of all of that?

Well, full disclosure, I was there.

Okay, good.

And what was caught on, Mike, is not a secret. It was in the context of something bigger, which is that we are facing an existential threat.

The country that we have coasted on the fumes of for decades now has turned against us. And, you know, the conversation was what we can do to avoid tariffs, what we can do if tariffs cannot be avoided.

It was actually a more productive conversation than I thought it could be under the circumstances, and one that was led by the Prime Minister in a way that I have not seen him perform since he was providing testimony in front of the investigation as to why the Emergency Measures act was invoked. And I think there is a moment here I want to touch on two things. At the end of Kendrick Lamar’s performance, the screen goes to the.

The entire arena and it says, game over. Like a video game. The game is over. It’s been exposed. Right. We are no longer in a.

Let’s kid ourselves about who Trump is and making America great again. The whole thing seems to be a game that is now being unmasked to be something quite different.

Though the mainstream media seems very slow to come to it. Wired has been terrific, but most media, most professional journalists covering it are either retired, like Carlos Quinta.

I’m gonna mispronounce his name, but it’s a. It starts with Quinted. Quinted or something like that. And now Acosta Jim Acosta.

So the retired journalists and Wired and some kind of young upstarts within the journalism world are taking this very, very seriously. But most of the legacy media are not because they’re owned by the billionaires that were standing behind him during.

Standing behind Trump during his inauguration. So we’ve got fake news, all right, and the game is over. The fake news was designed to mislead us.

The second point I want to make is that I guess I want to make two points. The second point that I really wanted to make was that your question, Alan, about is this really being a 51st state for critical minerals.

We have critical minerals, but we don’t mind them.

I know, I know.

So we, at the moment, we are an undeveloped natural resource, as is Greenland. And don’t forget, this threat is not just Canada. It’s Canada. It’s Panama, it’s Greenland.

It’s truly it. It truly is Monroe esque. It is North America, isn’t it?

It is very. It’s a sphere. It’s a sphere of influence and it’s not a joke.

And I don’t think it’ll be military, but I think it will be economic warfare that brings us to our knees or tries to bring us to our knees. So I think we do need to up our game and all the solutions to upping our game will take some time to actually bear fruit.

So there’s this interim period and we need to talk about what is it that we can do in the immediate. And, but my last point will be this. I’m not 100 convinced that we are talking about three nodes of power. Three nodes.

I mean, if you take, if you take the news that we have received about who’s in the treasury and what they’re doing with that data, you know, they’ve built in a back door for somebody who is the back door for somebody. It’s going to be Russia. It’s not going to be Chinese assets. It’s going to be Russian assets that are helping Russian assets.

So I think this is a way of, you know, asserting an end to the Cold War by, by using Trump as a sock puppet. I don’t know what they got on him, but they’ve got something on him and they’ve been paying him. But there’s something more going on.

So let me make a few comments and then throw to you, Alan, on the one hand, your point about the back door is this is such a catastrophe that if there is a backdoor, it’s not exclusive, it’s anyone who wants to access it.

Right, for a price.

Not even for a price. That’s how sloppy this is going down.

If Chinese intelligence can literally take over the lawful access of the US Telecom, they can handle these kids computers because this is such a rushed job.

But secondly, to your point about the, the powers at play, the thing I want to talk about and Alan, I want to throw to you because obviously you have a career as a public opinion researcher.

I am so cynical, Armin, I almost wonder if an economic war is not even necessary, that what we’ve seen with the polievs, what we’ve seen with the convoy people, is the social media war, the perception war, the propaganda war, especially if they’re not in a rush, can be very effective in and of itself. So even though they could threaten the economic stuff. I live in eastern Ontario and I can tell you I encounter MAGA people all the time who.

They see his invitation as a really nice offer.

So I’m curious, Alan, you’ve talked about this before, but to what extent are we vulnerable on a public opinion perspective or are we seeing the opposite, a resurgence kind of in patriotism, in a sense of people saying, you know, we are Canadian because we’re not American and we want to keep it that way.

Well, I mean, someone who described Canadian identity as the narcissism of small differences is that basically what we do is that we look into the mirror of America and see something that looks very, very similar to the image that is there, and then we define ourselves in terms of what we do not see. So the extent to which Americans are warlike, we are tolerant, the extent to which Americans are uncharitable, we are charitable.

And that said, I know that sounds very superficial as a basis of defining identity. It’s very, very deep.

I mean, Canadians, you know, not only are very happy to be proudly Canadian, but proudly happy to be not American as part of this. I mean, our Prime Minister said as much as that.

So I mean, the extent to which public opinion or Canadian public opinion provides any guardrails against these motives that you and Armin are talking about, it’s pretty strong and maybe in fact our strongest defense.

There’s not a politician in this country who could stand up and say, I think we should take this seriously and that maybe we could avoid tariffs and have lower tax rates and our companies could be more productive and that we would have free flow of, of labor, all the things that might come with the customs union, and it would be resoundedly rejected at the, at the popular, Popular culture level. I, I don’t want to. We’re jumping around here a little bit, Priscilla.

I mean, I, I don’t want you to tell stories out of school, but I’m very interested to get a general sense of what came out of that meeting there. Did you get the sense that the. Some. I guess there’s almost 200 delegates who were invited first take this really seriously.

And secondly, unlike the journalists you were talking about, who just see this as kind of an incremental event, see this as an existential event for which we have to have a very, very radical solution the likes of which we’ve never tried before in the past.

I think it would not be telling tales out of school that this was more of a pro business than a pro Canada moment, and that what we were hearing about was what was happening in real time and what could be happening. And this was an effort because it was repeated over and over again. Strategy one is to not get the tariffs at all, right.

That it was assembling the manufacturing elite, the business elite, to use every connection they had with supply chains and contacts in the United States to make the case. And I think that was done really effectively.

I think that did stir people in a way that maybe they did not expect to be stirred coming in, and some of whom will not act, but most of whom will kind of see the whole lay of the land now in a way that they might not have before. I have to say again and repeat that the Prime Minister performed extemporaneously, without notes and was extraordinary.

He was extraordinary in his grasp of all the different files that are of interest and what their relative meaning is and how they could be supported. So it was not initially. We know there’s going to be a world of pain and we are here to help you. It was a.

We have to stop this before it happens, because if we don’t stop it, that world of pain will be very large.

And that was received well by, by the delegation. That message.

They’Re living it.

But what do you mean?

They’re all, they’re. They’re all.

Look, they’re feeling the pain.

You mean there is nothing that business hates more than uncertainty, right? Nothing. Zero. They can’t do any planning. So people are already laying workers off.

They are already anticipating, you know, either closing shop or moving south of the border. These things are already happening without the tariffs Being there. To your point, Alan, about.

Or maybe both of you at some point have said that it is the mood, it is the. The narrative that has unfolded. I would challenge what you said, Alan, about. We will reject it wholeheartedly, though, in Alberta, that’s true.

To Jesse’s point, there are pockets of people that just say, I want to be part of what Trump is offering. But in Alberta, some of those pockets that used to be F. Trudeau are now F. Trump flags.

So, like, it’s hard to tell where Canada will go when you take a look at the popularity ratings Trump’s has climbed recently, even though he’s rattling the entire. I think he’s at 53% positive rating right now.

Highest. He’s been.

Highest. He’s been at a time when he. When he is shaking reality to its foundations.

Yeah.

So there are a lot of people that just love the bad boy thing. And we saw that with Rob Ford, we saw that with Doug Ford. This is not a new phenomenon.

It’s like the, you know, I’m not the establishment and I’m a bad boy, and I’m here to, like, fight for you. Even if they don’t fight for you, it’s like, oh, yeah, dude, you’re just like me. I’m a loser, too. But there you are. You’re in power.

Cool. So let me use that then to kind of shift the conversation. And, Alan, I’ll throw to you again for this.

And let me start by saying I personally don’t agree with the Russia hypothesis. I believe that Russia is involved, that they’re a beneficiary, that he’s a stooge, but that they do not have the competence that we think they do.

But they are a party to this mess, and they will benefit from this mess tremendously. But I think China’s at the table as well. I think the billionaires are at the table. I think there’s lots of hawks at the table.

And that’s why I kind of feel it’s a confluence of events.

But it was interesting to see you sort of, I’m projecting here lament the fall of our current prime minister, because I don’t think there is any scenario in which he will continue to be the prime minister, even if the Liberal Party all of a sudden decided we, you. We love you. So where is the leadership in Canada to handle this?

And I say this because I made a rather cynical post this morning, what used to be a tweet where I said, the reason, you know, Canada’s finished is because the only Action people are thinking of is consumer actions, right? They can’t think like citizens, they think like consumers. And they think by buying stuff they’re going to save the country.

And, and no one’s saying, hey, we gotta organize into unions. Hey, we gotta organize into coalitions. Hey, we gotta hit the streets. So, Alan, I’m gonna throw to you first.

Cause I want Armin to have time to think about this, even though I suspect she may have some answers off the back. But where is this leadership gonna come from?

Who are the politicians, who are the people who, if you look on the landscape, could be on that front line of saying we can’t join the U.S. here’s why.

Well, I mean that you’ve got to look at the federal liberal leadership race right now, and the two front contenders are making it a cornerstone of their entire campaign that they are best able to stand up to Donald Trump and then they intend to stand up to Donald Trump both for dollar for dollar tariff retribution and also other. I mean, a recent poll showed that to that test, Carney far outstripped Freeland in terms of the public acceptance.

And the public response, in fact, had a little bit of a lift in the polls over the last two or two or three weeks.

And you can see a certain amount of desperation from Pierre POV also with his announcement both, you know, in the Arctic and also just the rebranding of the party that they’re talking about now that the axe, the tax have been withdrawn from his, his, his quiver. But I mean, it’s a good question. I don’t think we will lack in Canada the fortitude or the individuals or leadership.

I mean, I think you have seen a unification. I mean, I wrote an article about, you know, that, that Doug Ford running against Trump is, is in some respects a threat to federalism.

Because what he will, has the temptation to do is to advance Ontario’s interests at the expense of the rest of the country and you know, and make it weaker as a consequence.

My concern is America, that you have, you know, Republican elected officials who are completely in the thrall of, of Donald Trump to the point where I don’t know why they didn’t want to have the jobs they have anymore. Because, no, seriously, because it’s not a job. It’s one thing to say, okay, I really want to Keep my job, but only if your job is important.

If you have no say over anything, if you have no control over spending, why would you want to be a congressperson? There’s no, no reason at all.

But also the Democrats, and this is one of the things I really want to talk specifically to our Amina boat, because we’ve talked about this in the few episodes that we’ve done already that, you know, that Franklin Delan Roosevelt would be rolling over in his grave if he saw that blue collar workers were supporting Donald Trump. And we’ve seen a shift in blue collar supporters in Canada to Conservatives too.

I mean, clearly in Doug Ford’s camp, I mean, I worked for the Progressive Conservative Party for 30 years. I never once saw a union endorse the Progressive Conservative Party.

And this was a time when we had people in our caucus like Joe Clark and Flora McDonald and David McDonald, who’d feel uncomfortable in the NDP caucus today because it’s too conservative.

But I just, I, I just, it’s, it’s befuddling to, to, to me, I know that the Democrats in the states are consumed with issue and that many of them are saying, look, it’s, it’s at this juncture, it’s way more important to be reflective than it is to be combative.

Because if we don’t figure out this other stuff, this more fundamental stuff of how, you know, that we’re losing Latino votes, how we’re losing black votes, especially among younger males, how we’re losing blue collar votes, and why we just can’t seem to figure out the formula to get that back. Give us any insights you have. Help us here.

I was talking to my partner this morning, the guy that has all these records about why the Democrats have been so quiet lately.

Yeah.

Not. It’s not just mainstream media that has been lacking in incisive, inviting commentary. It has been the Democrats themselves.

Even AOC has been remarkably quiet. I think the Democrats left Trump of fairly robust economy and within weeks he is trashing it, absolutely trashing it.

And I don’t think they know what to do in this moment. That is still about affordability, but it’s also about the durability of the economy.

And you know this guy that campaigned on the price of eggs and the price of eggs has quadrupled.

Yeah.

Because of avian flu. The story about affordability is still front and center. And virtually everybody in Canada and the United States talks about affordability.

It’s not just Pierre P. That says, I’m going to cut your taxes. That’s My answer to your affordability problem, right? It’s also Bonnie Crombie in Ontario. It’s also the ndp.

It’s like cutting taxes is just like, I’m sorry, you want to spend all this money and the way you’re going to do it is by cutting taxes. Like we are in la la land fiscally right? Like everybody is saying the same thing everywhere.

We’re going to spend more and we’re going to cut your taxes. It’s like, show me that money tree, baby, because I want a piece of it too.

But that’s an important point because I think we’re seeing a united assault on the administrative state. Right?

Even the right and left, on a perceptive level, are, to your point, offering the kind of fiscal reality that will hamper any future policies, any future capabilities.

Like, we don’t just have libertarians in control of America saying we are going to gut the administrative state and make sure that government is only able to do what we want it to do.

AI aside, I think to your point, that perception has infected almost all of politics and I want to flip this around and I’ll throw it to either of you.

We talked al in an episode or two episodes ago about party discipline and I was thinking about that a lot because I kind of feel the problem with the Democrats right now, the problem with the NDP right now, is party discipline. That yes, you need parties, you need those parties to be able to act in unison. You need to be able to act as a solid group.

But I think discipline in the age of the Internet needs to be rethought so that an AOC could have a free playing field within the Democratic Party to, you know, win friends and influence people to put ideas out there the same way. To go to my last point, because I think my phone was listening.

I mentioned Sarah Jama and now my TikTok is full of videos from Sarah Jamaica, the independent, now Hamilton MPP and was NDP member the ndp.

If she was able to be a free radical within the NDP and allow all the NDP people to have those different policy debates, it would be an interesting ndp. Like you have much more competition ideas. Go ahead.

I don’t know that that’s necessarily the case. Sarah Jama got kicked out because of her position on what was happening in Gaza.

She doesn’t know the upside from the downside of how to run an economy. So you would have an issue.

But that’s true of a lot of candidates you have to acknowledge. Pardon me, that’s true of a lot of candidates you have to acknowledge that’s true.

But you’re talking about her being like, a free radical, and it’s like she’s good on this issue if you agree with her.

But like, we were talking about an existential crisis in how not only the Canadian economy functions, which means how your living is going to be made. How my living is going to be made. I mean, it’s going to affect us.

Individually and, to be clear, about to happen.

And it’s revolutionary. We have never seen anything like this before. And we’re talking about Gaza. That’s cool.

No, no, no, no. Hold on. No, because you’re mischaracterizing me. So I just have to clarify.

Okay.

I’m suggesting that we should have a crowdsourced model to party politics and not party discipline. I only cited this one individual, not because of her particular economic expertise or policy, but just because she showed up in my TikTok feed.

But we can go back to AOC as the example you brought up. And I’m just saying I think the crisis. I agree with you. We have merits, some crowdsourcing.

Can I just push back a little bit on crowdsourcing versus party discipline?

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’ve been watching how the Senate has functioned since the Liberals were excommunicated from the second chamber and how there is no higher order of pursuit. It’s like a herd of cats. They’ve all got, like, they’re all brilliant, they’re all lovely, they’ve all got their own projects.

And it’s like, there’s no higher order of purpose. And I think without some form of discipline, all you’ve got is a herd of cats. You don’t have.

You don’t have a platform that you’re trying to sell to the voting public. So all you’ve got is, like, everybody’s idea, and there’s no there there. You can’t actually marshal a coherent. What we’re trying to do is this.

Do you like that or do you not like that? Vote for it. Work with. With us. I’m not sure where I’m standing on this. I’m an economist. I don’t even know why I’m weighing in on this.

But, like, it kind of. It wrinkles at some level because it feels like everything is so decentralized. It is atomized. It is impossible to control.

And then these Bigfoots come through that are autocrats and they take it all because we’re so disorganized.

Let me shift gears a little bit, because it Strikes me we’re starting to talk a little bit about the ball and forgetting about the game, whether it’s discipline or crowdsourcing.

I mean, the fact of the matter is, is that what it’s, what is at the root of all this chaos that we’re talking about, we’re so consumed about right now is vast sums of the Western world population who believes the system isn’t working for them. The right has been very clever in captivating that sentiment. I will work for you on behalf of this system. That I will drain the swamp.

I will do to the point where a lot of people are even supporting the right against their own economic best interests. The left has been far less successful.

But yet you look historically, when we had this kind of, you know, massive dislocation, Industrial Revolution, the Gilded Age at the turn of the century.

And this, Jesse, something that you’ve been writing about is what has happened is out of civil society has grown other organizations more decentralized that have risen up to say, we will protect you from the system. We have a different way of doing things.

One of the things I’m really intrigued by right now in the face of all of this shift to the right in the polling I’ve done, I have never seen in my adult life higher support for unions than you have right now and more support for workers who are on strike against their employers than I have right now.

Is there a new role for non government agencies like unions, like more civil society rooted organizations, to start having a voice in this discourse, this nutty discourse, and giving people the kind of hope that would cause them to turn away from perhaps some of the traditional options that are facing. I know it’s a big long preamble to a big question, but do either. You got any views on that? Jesse, I know you’ve written on this.

You’re at a very interesting piece, in fact today, substack about, you know, a whole different way of, of governance.

Hi there, future Jesse here.

Unfortunately, I screwed up at this point because I had muted my mic as my dogs here on the farm were barking and then Alan threw to me and I forgot to unmute myself. Rookie mistake. So I apologize that this part of the conversation is missing, but the flow, the debate, the episode continues nonetheless.

Armin Wade in here. Armin.

I’m shocked at how short our memories are. So I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing since the mid-80s.

You don’t have to tell. You don’t have to tell.

Since the mid-80s, I’ve been doing what I’VE been doing. And the Trudeau administration at the federal level is the most progressive government I have seen in my life.

We have achieved child care, which women have been asking for 50 years. We went through a pandemic which shut down non essential parts of the economy to contain a contagion and then reopened it.

And we rebounded faster than any other country that did the same thing because of CERB primarily we have slower economy now for a bunch of reasons that is not the topic of this conversation, but just to say that we have no control. We just did a bunch of things like pharmacare, dental care, child care.

We funneled money into housing to deal with the housing and we funneled money into housing which the provincial, not all of the provincial governments used. But in B.C. it’s made a hell of a difference because the provincial and municipal governments played ball. So we don’t have control.

Okay, we don’t have control. But we actually made huge progress in the last few years. And to say, oh me, oh my, you know, it’s the time for government is over.

It’s just like, well, okay, but what I’m saying is I, I think, I think once the Democrats and one once and, and actually in the United States, I just want to say one other thing. Lina Khan did in the United States what no chair of the Federal Trade Commission had done for decades since the antitrust organization was set up.

She produced more regulations, she did more consumer protection. You take a look at what she did, which was just published days before she left.

And it’s just like the last two years have been just a flood of consumer protection and pro competition, anti monopoly measures. So we can do a lot. It depends on who is in power.

Now I want to get to the point about how do we get to someplace that is more pro people and less pro power for the sake of power. David Brooks, a few, maybe it was a week, 10 days ago, had a piece in the New York Times that talked about this, you know, autocratic moment.

We’ve been here before. And he linked it to the history of the Industrial Revolution and how the big robber barons came to be. And somebody. And I said this is a great piece.

It kind of situates the moment we’re in one of those history doesn’t repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes. It was one of those things that kind of reminded me, yeah, we’ve been here before.

And his point was at the end of this process, we developed the institutions that actually made life better for the many. And so I posted this thing on Blue sky. And somebody said, well, that’s great, but I don’t think it’s as great as you think it is.

What are we supposed to do? Just wait for new institutions? Which was a great question, which made me think, how do we get to those institutions?

Well, first of all, we had mutual aid circles. Then we had the arrival historically of trade unions. Then we had things like philanthropists starting libraries that became public libraries.

Then we had public education. Then we had daily journalism that was local, that was reporting on what was happening, that people were reading, like the masses were reading this.

Then we had statistics to measure how much resources do we have in our economy so we can wage war. We didn’t have those till the twenties. Around then was when we developed a professional public service that was not corrupted by power and grift.

That’s what led to the institutions that we rely on, like official statistics, like a good public service, like the things that make our quality of life possible.

And of all of those things, information and I guess science too, the advance of science and this desire to bring things like insulin to the world, like bring scientific advancements to, to the many. And the thing that has changed in this round is all of those things we were building up, the education, the news, the libraries, the.

This belief in some kind of larger version of like we’re pursuing truth. That’s all shattered now. But what hasn’t been shattered is organizing.

What hasn’t been shattered is the idea that when things go to ratchet, people will form mutual aid circles.

So touch on your point about Kendrick Lamar touching our spirits about what is wrong with the world and everybody got it that wasn’t white and middle aged.

I said none of that. Oh, but please go on.

Well, you were saying that Kendrick Lamar kind of tapped into this decentralized spirit that people were singing along with. Like he got.

I was using it as a metaphor of how culture.

Again, I think I’m going to throw it, Alan, but I think you are legitimately upset at the crisis that we are in and you’re misinterpreting my remarks and using them as an opportunity to express your legitimate concerns. But I think you have completely misconstrued what I was saying and arguing for. But Alan, you wanted to jump in.

Well, because I, I don’t see that kind of level of conflict. In fact, I think we’re touching on a whole bunch of other things without grabbing anything.

I mean, a number of those items that you talked about and you’ve been writing about in terms of decentralized authority Jesse sprung from non government sources.

I mean, in addition to a lot of the things that you cited, Armin, I mean, those of us who love history, I mean, not only the rise of unionism, but the rise of social gospel out of the United Church, the progressive movement, and then you’ve got civil rights movements and the women’s rights movements, Feminism, I’m wondering, All supported, as you said, by Armin, which I think is hugely important, and we’re also at risk right now is a belief in science and reason and, and using that as the foundation of any kind of reasonable discourse. I mean, are there new forces in society today that has that capability of rising up?

I mean, what Jesse was saying was, Kendra Lamar kind of demonstrates that there is, it might not be defined, it might not have a foundation or, or walls yet, but there is a, an atmosphere that is, is out there. The number of protests that happened this last weekend all over North America spontaneously.

I mean, is civil society strong enough to cause those kind of institutions to rise up in the, in the 21st century?

That would give people a rally post, something to turn to in the face of governments and a system that they seem to be giving up on, I guess, is the question. I don’t have the answer to that, but I think it’s a question that is worth pursuing not just on our podcast, but in society as a whole right now.

And there’s not enough people kind of digging that deep.

Well, and especially if you go back to the original question of how does the Democratic Party win back the American working class, and I believe wholeheartedly contrary to the Trump administration, that the answer is diversity, inclusion and equity.

And that’s part of why I’m arguing that I think party discipline is an obstacle to that, that there needs to be a diversity of voices who disagree respectfully, civilly, can still come together for agreement when they need to, when the enemy requires. So.

But I think we need these types of decentralized models because there are many people in society who do not want to submit to, to a party discipline, a party structure that does not allow them to speak their mind and to disagree respectfully.

And I have been, because of Alan and I conversations, I’ve been starting to do research into some of the congresspeople who have different ideas, who I think have a lot of talent and are coming to the moment. I agree with your point, Armin, about aoc, that she has been unfortunately silent.

She did do a live stream stream the way that Bernie actually just uploaded an eight minute TikTok that everybody’s talking about.

So I think they’re starting to come forward, but I think the word coup is very difficult for them to say because of how scary it is and because of the consequences.

And I think, Alan, since we are kind of coming to our end, I want to bring it back to where you started, which is whether the regime will defy the courts and what will happen as a result. Because it’s not so simple. They can ignore the chorus, but Democrats at least will get upset. Right.

Alan, you made the argument that professional civil servants might use that as an opportunity to rebel, to defy, to say, hey, I believe in the rule of law. So why don’t we end on kind of trying to not speculate, but anticipate how this is going to play out?

Because I think it’s not wrong to suggest that what we are witnessing in the near term is the rule of law versus might is right and we have reason to believe that the rule of law, as we would wish it, may not be the victor. So, Alan, do you want to revisit your original comments and maybe project them a little forward?

I could project, and it wouldn’t be the first time that I did so without having any competence or knowledge of the subject at hand. But I’m not going to today because I do, I do believe, I don’t know what the hell happens. I mean, J.D.

vance was quoting, you know, Andrew Jackson, that the Supreme Court can make judgments, but can they enforce them? I don’t even know what that means.

You know, I don’t know whether the military, you know, is, has the right to step in under that, whether there’s, you know, a breach between the judicial and the executive orders in a system that is supposed to be inherently rooted in, in checks and balances, you know, and that maybe one of the people we should be talking to, you know, is someone who really does understand the whole, you know, synergy and, and relationship of the judicial system and, and the legislative system a little bit better. Because I, I just don’t know. I mean, I mean, do you have any views on this?

Honestly, I find it just as perplexing as you, because logic, when you have a tripartite system that is supposed to be providing checks and balances on one another. The goal is that everybody gets that they’re not the king of the world, but he’s the king of the world.

And you can make that argument that, okay, the judiciary has to respond to the executive like that’s who they’re accountable to, but they’re also trying to keep that in check.

So I, well, and that was, and that was the whole basis of checks and balances to ensure that executive power never became king. Like, that was the whole framers of the Constitution.

And, and I, I, I, I guess because it was also based on the notion that, you know, good men and good women would find reasonable ground for compromise in the interests of the larger public good, that the rules of the game just kind of continued to be played.

Absent that isn’t, isn’t that I don’t.

Know what the rules are.

Yeah. Because we’re in a me first world.

Yeah.

Shortly after that, we’ve got it in Russia. Now we’ve got Make America Great again. It’s a me first world. And not only is it me first in terms of nationalism, it’s me first in terms of Trump.

Trump above all. Right. Like, he’s like the paragon of me first, and he means it literally for him.

So I don’t know how you work in a world that does not acknowledge that we’re interdependent, that, you know, the.

Whole purpose of this podcast is try to make sense out of chaos. We have failed to do that today.

Although let me ask one question, because the speed, like both of you, I think, share a widely held belief of like, we, we don’t know what’s going on. But the variable that makes me anxious is the speed by which this is happening.

So to articulate this more in a question that gets back to what we were talking about today, can Canadian politics keep up with this pace?

Because what the Trump, the whole move fast and break things mantra, the Silicon Valley ideology is if you outpace your competition, you can buy them later. That speed and growth and scale is the only thing at all costs. And this is absolutely how this regime is behaving.

And it strikes me that granted, the Ontario election, the upcoming federal election, are happening because of this crisis.

But on a velocity level, can our politics respond fast enough given that these guys are just going to keep throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticks.

I mean, I think institutionally, you kind of spoke to this earlier when you said crowdsource it. Because I think to Alan’s point, the fast response is going to be people on the street.

The fast response is going to be social media bringing people together in A kind of weird, unpredictable way is kind of like all this, these disaggregated particles that come together in a super wave. It comes and it goes, you know, in its wake you might destroy something in your turn too.

But it’s not an organized institutional politics, it’s something else. And I think that’s what we’re looking at.

I think there’s something really interesting there that we should spend a lot more, a lot more time on because as we go through the historic examples, I mean, it really does bring up that there are different ways. And the way it might happen in the 21st century would be very, very different than how it happened in the 19th or 20th century.

But that, that the very force of human nature that drives democracy and the desire to have a sense of agency and a role and, you know, be able to control isn’t going to be extinguished by Donald Trump or anyone else 100%.

And you know what, when I said mutual aid circles and some form of unionization is about the acknowledgement of interdependency and that together we are stronger. So some kind of counter organizing will emerge. But to your point, Jesse, the current system of union organizing is quite weak.

To your point, Alan, when you said you’d never seen unions stand with conservatives before, they are the minority of unions.

And they’re involved in the building almost all construction. I know that.

I do that. Like it’s not organic. It is. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.

Yeah, but there is under, under, under that this growing sense among that blue collar workers are disproportionately few in the.

Middle and gig workers, I mean, look at what’s happening to organizing.

I mean, and they are Amazon starting, Uber starting. And you know, and we talked also about young people too. Really interesting.

They say they’re turning for an alternative to the status quo in a scenario where they believe the status quo not only is not working for them, it’s actually working against them.

So we have lived experience. So it isn’t the promises of Poilier in Ontario. It is like, oh, Doug came in and look at what he did.

You know, Doug came in, he promised to work for workers, hasn’t been working for me. Promised to be there for the people. He’s been there for developers in the green belt, he’s been there for Therm Spa, but not there for me.

I can’t find a place to live. So I think that younger generation in Ontario not being as convinced by the Conservative promise is that it wasn’t promissory. It, it was.

They were government. What did they do? Not enough. So I think that’s part of it.

And I think Polievu is having a tough time reconfiguring his three word slogans to meet the moment.

There’s no question.

I mean, while it doesn’t relate to Ontario politics, our next guest on the episode is Avi Lewis. So we’re definitely gonna be talking to him about the ndp. Armin, you don’t have a line to merit Stiles, do you?

Not that she would come on our humble podcast, but funny you should say.

That because I’m writing a piece for the Star about what each party would do in Ontario for the economy in the next election. So I’m talking to somebody from Stiles Platform. I can certainly try and put them in touch.

Please. We’d appreciate it. We’d love to have her on to continue this conversation. Alan, any final words?

I’m exhausted. I need a nap, I think. Very good. Thanks so much for giving us your time. I mean, it’s always just great having you.

Armen, any last words?

Pardon?

Any last words?

Yeah, I’m sorry, Jesse, that I mischaracterized you.

Oh, no worries. These are heated times and I think these are the conversations we need to have. Right.

Because we’re sort of joking when we say this is a podcast having its political moments because of the Joe Rogans and the Theo Fawns of the world. But we’re doing our small part. So thanks, Armin, this has been wonderful. Thanks, Alan. And of course we’ll see everyone soon.

You can find us on the web, on YouTube, on Substack, and we’ll be back in a couple of days. Thanks.