6: Democracy in Crisis: A Conversation with Avi Lewis

Hi, I’m Jesse Hirsch, and this is Red Tory, recorded live in front of an automated audience. And I’m joined, as always, by my good friend Alan Gregg. And today we got Avi Lewis for Parliament. Well, the question. Exclamation. The hype.

Are there more dogs? Are there birds? What the hell’s going on here, Jesse? Good.

The dogs is a 1 in 100 chance because that was a live shot. It’s rare that they do that. But you coming here for the podcast has gotten them all excited. Yes. Yeah, absolutely.

Now, Alan, you know we start every show, of course, with me asking you what you’re paying attention to, but. But first, new theme song. Did we get it right?

Much better. Much better than that little jingle you had for a game show.

Right on, right on. Well, we’ll see how long we can get away with it before the copyright cops come after us.

But, Alan, what have you been paying attention to in the last few days?

Well, I mean, I’m still consumed with this flood of legal challenges against Trump’s executive orders and the prospect of them just ignoring them or defying them.

And since we first talked about it a couple days ago, just how much the entire Washington community is just saying, you know, we don’t know what would happen. We are just in such unprecedented areas. We just do not forget about the, The, The. The.

The trials and tribulations and the threat that that might pose. We don’t know even just kind of logistically what happens after. After that fact.

And on top of that, I was very intrigued by your sub stack today, too, about, very specifically how this relates to a lot of the Dodge initiatives in terms of mining data and accessing files and databases that they do not have authority to go into. And again, you know what that all means. And as you note in your substack piece, the prospect that.

That opens back doors for all kinds of other influences that, again, are not intended as part of legitimate rule of law government. So it’s. It again is kind of head swimming. What about you, Abby? What you’re. We know you’re on the stump.

We know that you’re going door to door, but in addition to your. Your constituents, what they’re telling you, what you want to get into as well, anything in the news there that’s kind of turning your head?

Well, I’m preoccupied by. By this moment. I mean, it’s. It’s. It’s overwhelming. We’re like in a cartoon garbage blender of a world where every day just brings.

I don’t know, actually, it’s like a garburator holding tank that we’re suddenly swimming in.

Every single day is a chopped up mess of fragments of reality and surreality, all of which are pretty doomful, largely pouring out of our, out of the mouth of our downstairs neighbor, the mad king.

My kid is 12 and very into American politics and he’s memorized Jimmy Kimmel’s 78 nicknames for Trump and he hasn’t actually spilled them all in one flow. I get them sprinkled in, so that’s at least worth, you know, it’s all gallows humor, but it’s a chuckle from time to time.

I, I mean, you know, I’m running for office. I love this format where you don’t introduce the guests. It’s totally lovely.

But I, I’m certainly preoccupied with what this political moment means for Canada.

And we’re having a national debate all of a sudden, a long needed one, I think, unfortunately, I feel like it’s happening on utterly predictable and dismal terms, sort of set by the politics of the last century and without a flicker of attention to the opportunity, to the existential crisis of the climate emergency and to the desperate need for rebalancing the scales of society, which are so fucking out of, out of whack. And so, yeah, so like everyone else, I’m raging at all my screens and saying, why don’t I run the media? If there was a media anymore.

Before we get into all of that though, I mean, I’m very intrigued by your actual decision to run for public office.

And my dad obviously was NDP leader in Ontario in the 70s when I was growing up and I’m pretty sure I was in diapers the first time someone said, when are you going to run for office? You know, so I think I just reflexively got used to saying no, no way.

And Jesse, you know, you and I met in the 90s around some really interesting work that was being done, I think cultural work on.

And it was right around the time of the WTO in Seattle.

Naomi and I both had a lot of intersections with those folks we met, the Sunrise Kids.

Democratic socialism. My God, remember that? It’s almost like President’s Choice memories of democratic socialism.

But on that point, let me ask you to take A relevant tangent in the context of our mandate here on Red Tory, which is to talk about radical policies, which is.

Which is recognizing that part of the problem in our public discourse, but certainly part of the problem on the left side of the political public discourse is we’ve ceded the radical ground to the far right.

They’re the ones who are getting to talk about radical policies, and they’re the ones who, even though they are the establishment, have evoked this anti establishment ethos.

So to your point about your journey to politics, take a quick tangent back to why you’re running for office in terms of the role that you think these kinds of. Broadly, because the Great Leap is a radical policy, even talking about some of the responses to climate change are considered radical policies.

How does that impact both your motivation, but also, to your point, your trajectory, the journey that you’re on?

It really is the same thing.

And the LEAP organization where I worked worked full time for five years after that was really an Overton Window project to try to normalize and bring into the realm of the conceivable political imagination ideas actually big enough to solve the crises that we face as society.

And when that crisis occurs, the change that happens depends on the ideas that are lying around. And he went on to say, that is our purpose. And I think he meant in the right wing think tank world.

But of course, we feel this strongly on the left to keep those ideas alive until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.

And they were like, well, we just, like, looked at what you guys were doing and, you know, spent a year studying different social movement attempts. And the leap was really, really helpful. So we’re just trying to, like. And we’re like, oh, my God, you know, but, you know, the actual.

The meaningful material process of taking those ideas lying around and making them the law of the land. Public policy affecting the material conditions of people’s lives, that requires political institutions.

And I think on the left in Canada, and particularly, we don’t have a sophisticated and mature relationship between inside and outside. And I feel like, because I have certain, you know, you look at the skills that you developed over the years. I’ve been on live tv.

I’m not afraid of cameras. I talk too much like most people on, like, most, you know, guys. Guys who look like us and do these kind of media things and.

And I feel I could play an inside role, but my heart and my accountability and my communities and my politics are rooted outside in social movements, and we need better communication, better strategizing, and better politics between the two spheres. So that’s really what pushed me into losing my marbles, having my midlife crisis, and actually running for office.

Let me put a stronger point on the question that Jesse started with there.

I mean, not only is the right radical voice in politics today, but there seems to be an act of resistance to move to the left or be radical, actually offer ideas. You talked about leap.

You know, it had to go there for a little while, and then the party just shoved it down to the riding level and it kind of died after a time I was around when I first started in politics, the ndp, not only were they anti free trade, they wanted to nationalize the banks. They were formally aligned with labor and class politics was at the core of what they were doing.

Oh, Alan, you’re stirring my soul.

To.

Hear this common sense come out of your mouth. Yes, do go on, do go on.

Hell, yeah.

And it was electric. And again, you know, you hear kind of this virtue signaling and performative, kind of, oh, let the rich pay their fair share.

But Jesse and I have talked about this before. I mean, and I’m a student of public opinion.

There is way more room on the left to actually mobilize voters and get them excited, especially young people right now who believe that not only is the system not working for them, it’s actively working against them. They want to rip the system down. And again, I’m a very long preamble. I mean, your colleagues, I mean, how do they react to you?

Why do they resist the kind of, you know, more unorthodox approaches to politics rather than kind of just trying to go mainstream?

Well, can I deftly dodge that question and answer a different one that I feel like answering.

Like a true politician running for election?

No. No, I can’t. No, honestly, I can’t. I don’t speak for, you know, the party. I definitely think. What.

I think it was remarkable that the LEAP resolution, which I went to the Edmonton convention specifically to, like, I’ll be honest, water down a doctrinaire resolution that said the LEAP manifesto should be adopted in whole by the NDP and all future electoral decisions must be guided by. It was how the original resolution was written. I was like, well, political parties don’t work that way, so this will never make it to the floor.

But could we fashion something that would make it to the floor?

And I worked with former MPs Craig Scott and Libby Davies and Megan Leslie, my aunt Janet Solberg, who’s been involved in the Ontario NDP for about six centuries. And we fashioned a new resolution from existing resolutions that did pass. And you’re right, it did.

Say this should be debated at the writing level, but picture it right.

This was the convention where the next morning, Mulcaire was tossed unceremoniously in one of the most dramatic moments in an NDP leadership situation ever.

And then in the stunned silence that followed, that I think one of the unions put up an emergency resolution that he should stay as leader for another 18 months. And he did. I don’t know if everybody remembers this, but that last leadership race was, like, incredibly long for that reason.

And a lot of people blame the LEAP resolution, which I think is. I really think it was a confluence of things.

But the leap resolution passed on the floor in Edmonton, and Rachel Notley gave the keynote speech the night before, and my dad gave a keynote speech the afternoon before, Rachel, in which he very graciously and delicately endorsed the leap wholeheartedly, without a lot of hyperbole. And the members voted for it. Okay. It wasn’t like, close. It was a big majority on the floor.

So I believe that the grassroots of the ndp, including in Alberta, supports a much more inspiring, bold. We don’t fill in the now hackneyed adjective as you please, but a much more materially left populist politics.

What the party decides, the caucus decides, the leaders decide. This is not something that they negotiate with candidates. You know, you know this.

But I think it’s, it’s a big tent on the left and I think that, that my brand of politics is well known. The fact that I’m running for the second time means that I am welcome on some level and I don’t apologize for it.

And I think it’s very in keeping with the direction that the party has been taking.

However, I just want to say the thing you said, Alan, about performative virtue signaling, I don’t know what that term really means, but it gets at something which is really bugged people and which is not working. And I actually don’t think it has anything to do with the ndp. I think it has everything to do with Democrats, with Liberals and with centrists.

And I just. Can I unfold this really quickly? Because I think to me this is fundamental.

But just for the record, the longer you go on with the answers, the longer we’re going to stay here recording. So as long as you got time.

Hell yeah, I got all day for you guys. I mean, please continue talking about this stuff that matters.

I just think that we’ve had in Canada is a decade of performative progressivism and my own take.

And you know, I don’t expect everyone to agree with this, but the collapse of the center and the wave of the populist far right in this moment, to me is related to the fact that taking Trudeau as an example. But I think you can talk about Biden, I think you can take a talk about Obama, I think you can talk about Martin and Kreichen.

For me, it’s the collapse of centrism.

Is that what we get, particularly with the Trudeau brand, is economic policies that have relentlessly distributed wealth upward, that have created and deepened a material crisis for working class people. And the majority of people are now paying 10 bucks for butter, 2 bucks for a single apple, $4,000 for a two bedroom apartment in downtown Vancouver.

And this is the result of policy, economic policy where the banks make $50 billion a year, five big oil companies make more than $200 billion in a single year, and people can’t afford a dignified life. That is the result of the economic policy pursued by. Hang on. Because what he does is.

And what liberals always do is they Smear a sweet veneer of progressive rhetoric on top of Right. And what we. Paris, we’re back. We’re going to take climate change seriously. Pronouns in bio, all the things, right?

Yeah.

And now we’re getting the backlash.

Not against the economic engine that has created this epic crisis and a vast fissure opening through which fascist storm troops are now marching through. The backlash is coming against the performance of progressive blah, blah, blah, which was never fucking serious in the first place.

They didn’t implement any of it in real policy. And it was all a performance.

And so to me, this is why we are where we are now, and this is why left populism, even eco populism, climate populism, is absolutely a political formula that could catch fire because we will address the existential crises we face and we can make people’s lives better through the use of government power to stand up to the real powers behind the throne in a way that we might even be able to start peeling off some of the young guys watching, people whose names we all know. And that’s the politics we need right now.

And I do want to ask you about the Overton Window, because I think that that is a key part of this. And I like that you brought that up.

But I want to state for the record, either you have access to my writing notes or thank you, because my post Tomorrow is on CB McPhers and possessive liberalism, which is, to your point, the underpinning of how we have this terrible wealth concentration happening under liberal government. So thanks. Your audio clip for that was gold.

I’m happy to help, Jess.

But to follow up Alan’s point and your assertion that the ground is fertile amongst the public for the support of these policies.

But it feels to me that the Overton window is so rooted in a center right, and I feel most of our lives we’ve been trying to get that Overton window to go left. And we are at a moment where the media consolidation, the algorithmic control is such it’s designed to keep that Overton window moving. Right.

So I’m curious, as a media professional, as a revolutionary, if you don’t mind me saying that, what would you recommend, what would you say to us on the grassroots throughout the communications world, what do you think needs to happen to really shift that Overton window to the left?

I think so.

And he had to go down and try out his neoliberal laboratory under blood and fire in Chile under dictatorship, because the early 70s was not a friendly economic time for that kind of economic shock therapy. We may be in the wilderness or we may be on the brink of a breakthrough. And I think that politics is so volatile these days.

I think the digital acceleration of life and of communication is such that we just need to be ready for when the next wave comes along. And in the meantime, we keep trying.

And now, as Maud Barlow warned for decades, they’re coming for the water and we’re defenseless practically because we’ve already sold our economy and become America’s gas tank, America’s lumber yard. And now when we become America’s reservoir. We were right.

That doesn’t mean there’s no joy in that, but we should absolutely be claiming what we warned about. And we had this moment now where look at what China did with the tariffs that the US put on China and the whole deep seat phenomenon.

Those tariffs and the hoarding of superchips or the rationing of superchips towards China created an environment which China was able to open source or tech entrepreneurs in China were able to open source something cheaper and nimbler that didn’t rely on on the testosterone toxic brute force logic not only of AI, but of this entire generation of tech overlords and actually open source something which is elegant, faster, simpler, whatever.

Not that I think it’s like panacea and come to save us all, but there is an opportunity in this crisis when the US is throwing up these spiked walls on the border, economically speaking. And we have an opportunity to do a lot of the things we always said we needed to do.

Which is why what I was really reading right before we started chatting was Hadrian Mertens Kirkwood, who is one of the smartest writers on climate and on economic policy today, works at the Canadian center for Policy Alternatives. Just put out a piece this morning saying we don’t need an east west pipeline. What a garbage idea.

It’s like every opportunistic fossil fueled proposal in the midst of a crisis. Like all that LNG was going to like be our response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. First of all, billion tens of billions of dollars.

TMX is up to $50 billion.

Thanks Chrystia Freeland for the $20 billion that she authorized the Friday afternoon before she quit cabinet on Monday, boosting the price of TMX to us all beyond 30 + billion to 50 + billion.

A new east west pipeline would cost even more than that which have to be rammed through 180 different First nations territories and would not be ready for a decade, two decades. Come on. What we need is an east west electricity grid. Oh my God. This is a nation building moment. This is steel, this is construction, this is tech.

This is putting renewables online and doing what Europe did when Russian gas after the invasion was being held as a guillotine over their energy necks and actually reduce their reliance on fossil fuels by like 20% or Russian gas anyway. This is an ideal moment for that. Why the hell are we not reading this in every headline? This is the moment.

And so I just think we have to keep putting these things forcefully and building power inside and outside to be ready when the moment is propitious. And then we will, I guess we’ll take power in the state, Jesse.

And then we’ll have like a, we’ll have a citizens assembly and you know, a bunch of really know grassroots. Then we’ll have to direct democracy workers cooperative. I’m just kidding. We’ll, we’ll get.

No, don’t be kidding because I don’t, I don’t want to beat this to death, but I mean, I would submit that, you know, the analysis of what the problem is is well understood and it’s articulated by both the right and the left. The difference is that the right are offering solutions to that problem.

The left aren’t unlike what you just did in terms of an electrification option versus a fossil fuel option. I wonder why the NDP wouldn’t say, you know what, if elected, we will never ever introduce back to work legislation.

You know what, if someone works 40 hours a week, they must have a living wage. Restaurants, all the hospitality industry. If you’re not prepared to do that, then you’re going out of business. We’re having no more tips.

$25 minimum wage is where we’re at right now.

I mean that’s not a living wage in Vancouver, Allen. But yes, minimum wage is a place to start for sure. Whatever, whatever is.

And we just got back from, from, from, from Europe. And just as an example, there are the gig workers, the taxi drivers, the people who are working in, in restaurants. They don’t have tips.

And if you offer them tips, they say, you know what, we would rather you come here two times a week and we made 10% off you. Then you came one time a week and we made 15 off you. We’ve actually become allies with the small business people.

First responders should be paid at least, you know, 50% more than the average wage nationally. That’s a bare, bare minimum. I love this.

It’s so great that you’ve joined the NDP platform committee. You are welcome here, brother.

But are you on the NDP platform committee on me?

Oh, listen, listen, I’m a candidate.

I’m knocking doors, I’m trying to get elected. It takes all my time.

Ganja. Ganja. Conservative. Yeah.

You know, Alan, that’s going to end up being a TikTok right there though. Anyway, please.

Javi, that. Well, I love that rant.

And I, and I, and I really agree and I think we do have the solutions and I, and I think there’s a bunch of them that the NDP has brought forward and there’s a bunch that I would more than I would like to see them bring forward. You know, what’s working at the doors. I’m so. We’ve knocked four or five thousand doors in this riding since I started.

What kind of feedback you’re getting on the ground.

We talk to people about the insane price of food and if there’s a full scale trade war with the United States, it’s going to be even worse.

And the NDP supports price caps and it’s something that they tried in France and the government did a study of fair prices with producers and distributors. Not with the retail giants that were price gouging, but with the rest of the food system.

They came up with fair prices for like 5,000 different food items. And when they implemented them, when they regulated them, when they made them a law, food inflation came right down. Expected.

It’s not, you know, and we also need windfall profit taxes on corporations that are, that are price gouging in the middle of a cost of living crisis. And we need to break up the effect of monopolies in every sector of the Canadian economy.

Yeah, no more food, no more share buybacks. You buy back if you can’t think of anything to do with your capital other than your existing share. Yeah, because it’s 75 tax on I.

I mean all of these things are. Would actually, we would have. What we’re talking about is a Government that would actually regulate corporations.

The old school version of government, I’m not sure if it ever really existed, but the old school idea of government was a mediated space between capital and labor. Right? And what we’ve had is Team Canada, which means Team Corporate Canada, which means government has a handmaiden.

I, I, that’s a sexist, terrible old term, but like a servant of capital. And this is what we’ve lived with all of our adult lives.

And we actually now the scales have tipped so dramatically that we need government to actually stand up to capital. It’s as simple as that.

And that is whether it resonates with you or not, when Jagmeet talks about billionaires and reining in the power of billionaires, exactly what he’s talking about. And we do need that now we can quibble about the messaging and you’ll do your public research, blah, blah, blah.

But like, I feel like the core is strong, people are ready for it.

And when I talk to young people who are more conservative these days, as all the polling shows, and I talk to lots of them at their doors, they’ve been, you know, they’ve been red pilled by Jordan Peterson and Pierre Poliev and they’re excitedly talking about, well, you know, just GDP is not a real measure. It’s gotta be GDP per capita. I’m like, okay, sure, let’s talk about per capita gdp.

They agree with me that there is a small elite which is screwing the rest of us. Yes. So I call that capitalism and I call that small elite. The financialized heights of the corporate economy, and they call it woke is the woke mob.

Right? And trans, etc. And we, you know, so the, the first step of the diagnosis is shared between left and right wing populism.

And I think we got a lot of work to do to share the rest of the diagnosis. But the entree is there. And I’m having some great conversations with folks young and old on the basis of that fundamental worldview.

We are getting screwed by a small elite. And that’s just true.

So let me ask you a question, sort of with your media professional hat, but also with your political instincts.

I might have to dig it out of a bottom drawer here.

Hang on, it’s still there. You came for a tech check, Avi. You showed your colors.

Guilty is charged.

I fundamentally agree with the premise that elections are won door to door, right? Shaking hands. And that is, as a candidate, the most important thing you can do.

But on a national level, the parties have a role in advertising and campaigns in media. And that’s where the NDP to a certain extent doesn’t have the same resources as the corporate backed party.

Do you have thoughts on how to overcome that? Do you have thoughts on how to compensate for that?

Given that I agree with your premise, your hypothesis that we are due for a big swing to the left and what you were describing on a door to door interaction is I think also what needs to happen. But at the same time I don’t think that is happening in all the writings. Right.

I’m curious what you think could be happening could happen so that the national campaign is not outspent or outgunned or outplayed by the campaigns that have the resources that have the corporate backing.

Yeah, I mean we have to be real. It’s a tremendous amount of money that the Conservatives have, the Liberals, when they drag in another banker to excite their real constituency.

Who does a banker appeal to? Just wondering they, they can raise a bunch more money. And the NDP, you know, we’ve got 25 seats and we don’t have the same kind of war chest.

I mean that’s just real. I think there’s, there’s lots to be done and I don’t, I just, I mean you got, you know, politics is, is, is very like get real.

You know, it’s not, we can’t pretend that suddenly $40 million is going to appear out of, you know, in a month, out of the blue.

But I saw Jagmeet making appeal to content creators on online and I think there is quite an ecosystem of progressive content creators on TikTok and elsewhere and they’ve been explaining things in beautiful, smart, quick, energetic ways and I think some connective tissue there could be very powerful. I think that again, we got to be real. The right has been culture eats policy.

Policy for, for breakfast and the right has been creating culture for a generation.

And that means not like a TikTok star is going to change everything or we need our Joe Rogan or some of these liberal pipe dreams that we, we saw I think a lot in the last election cycle in the US People who are on three hours a day like you guys are, you know, starting to actually take up some wallpaper space. That’s what’s required. And there need to be a thousand of them.

And so, you know, we’re behind on the left in the, in the online world where opinion is getting shaped. We have some bright lights. We don’t have an ecosystem as usual.

There isn’t anyone with deep pockets who has the interest in gathering them behind A political project we don’t have power to offer as the dangling, you know, bait for all coming in the tent. And so we gotta be real about where we’re at.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be thinking, you know, watching what has succeeded on the other side and not just parroting it or imitating it, but actually metabolizing it and figuring out what our authentic version is of it. And I think, you know, despite the very President’s choice memories of name of your podcast, I’m pleased to see the space.

Let me take a veer on that very thought. Because we talk about the system not working. Part of the system that is not working for most people is the political system.

When you believe that all politicians are corrupt, that they’re liars, that they’re sleazeballs, and then someone says, donald Trump is a liar, sleazeball, it’s like, so what? There’s no big, big deal there. We’ve started a conversation and we haven’t gone very far with. But I’m especially interested in your perspective.

This is. You did a piece with your old friend Libby Davies on how social movements drive change.

The notion of a lot of the change that we’re looking for coming not so much out of the political system, out of the party system, but more out of the grassroots. I mean, you talk about content creators, the music community.

We talked about Kendra Lamar the other day and you know, what his performance in, at the halftime at the super bowl, what difference that made to a huge number of people tapping into the filmmakers, musicians, dancers, painters as a source of these things, the ecology movement and the, you know, that’s, that’s out there mobilizing these organizations in aid of, of larger goals. Do you see any of that happening right now? We know historically, you know, how important the United Farmers of Alberta were.

We knew how important the cooperative movement was. We knew how important the unionist movement was in changing society. You see any of that going on at the grassroots now?

I see a lot of people on the left reflecting on the importance of creating culture and creating a culture which is not just welcoming, but is seductive. You know, I think that the There, there.

I think it’s possible to speak reflectively and critically about what it’s like to be in left, a lot of left movements, and people are tense and grim, you know, because we’re fighting real things. Genocide in Gaza is not a fun thing to organize around. You know, it’s.

There’s deep trauma when you confront these profound injustices and, but also, you know, it’s hard for me to talk about this without falling into the language that I resist. But, you know, like, the stress people feel of, like saying the wrong thing or using the wrong words on the left is real.

And that doesn’t create a culture where people feel at ease, where people feel at home and people feel welcome.

And the notion that movements, you need a special, you need a special language guide in order to be one of the crew in a movement is going to keep us small and it’s going to keep us marginal. And that doesn’t mean we have to have a tent so big that we don’t care what people believe.

We’re united by common commitments to the fundamental human rights of people, to housing and health and food and to peace.

But the culture on the left needs to find a way to channel more joy, to channel more defiant celebration in the face of these outrageous injustices and to be really welcoming and patient with people. And again, like an election campaign is a really interesting place to try out some of these things. It’s a short term autonomous community.

And the people coming to work on my campaign, we have 3, 400 volunteers in the pool now. And one of our big jobs is just calling everybody who signed up and getting them to sign up for a shift. But we have an active discord.

We have a community that gathers. We see 10, 12, 15 people regularly coming out door knocking every night and, and people.

I asked a new volunteer what dropped, what drew her to, to come and knock on doors for the first time the other night. And she paused and said, you know, it’s something I’m doing for my mental health. And I was like, wow, yeah, because we are safe with each other.

Yeah, we’re not doom scrolling at home in isolation, fear and anxiety. We are actually doing something. We acknowledge all of the limits of electoral politics.

We don’t pretend that sending one dude to Ottawa to be 1 out of 343 is going to change the world. But we are building community power.

We are talking to our neighbors about the price of butter and we’re doing it in groups of people where we agree about the injustices, we agree that there are solutions that we can articulate to each other. And we feel so much better when we do it together, when we get together and do it.

And so this is the kind, I think, you know, part of it is because it’s short.

The time that the track is short, people come and then, you know, maintaining campaign communities between elections is much more challenging, although we really, really try. But it’s that community building that was so desperately needed.

I’m itching to respond only because I absolutely love what you’re saying. And it ties back to what you said earlier about how the right is ahead of us on culture. And part of that is an institutional reason. Right.

They have and created cultural institutions that really allowed that to flow.

But to tie that to another point, I think the reason that the left is on the cusp of some really big movements is I think our culture is now starting to come into place.

And I say this because I personally had a really transformative moment through the pandemic, quote, still ongoing, where I realized that I’ve been disabled my entire life, and I really spent a lot of time immersed in the disability justice movement and the disability rights movement and really shifted me to kind of the ideology of care and recognizing that the future of the left really has a lot of power around the future of care.

And that strikes me to your point about the mental health appeal of canvassing, that these are the types of things that I think have a lot of potential and tremendous energy. To Alan’s point earlier, that we should be paying social workers more, for example, in terms of valuing the labor out there.

And before I pivot this into completely unrelated, but kind of related.

Oh, don’t.

Don’t question.

Because this is so, so important, Jesse.

Okay. Okay, then I’ll let you respond. But I do want to say I’m.

Writing my next email to my list right now, so don’t stop.

Right on. Since you wrote my newsletter earlier, that’s what I figured. It strikes me to go back to your dig or your jest about Red Tory, that part of.

And it was originally my idea for red Tory, and Alan was uncomfortable at it at first because he understands the real meaning. But I like red, as in except.

Just, you know, there is a hyphen between red.

I saw the hyphen. The hyphen is critical. I think it all happens in that hyphen. Whatever.

Exactly. Yes, yes. In the interstitial spaces. So for me, it’s red, as in really red. But Tori is in artificial intelligence. Right?

Tori, in the sense of the effective accelerationists who want to use AI and Mars as whatever reason to use false fossil fuels, that there’s some areas maybe we do want to be conservative.

And it’s in trying to create that contradiction, trying to create that space that I think the ideology of care all of a sudden has a really fertile space. So go ahead. You wanted to jump.

I mean, what was the cut line on the LEAP manifesto, a Canada based on caring for the earth and one another.

And I was going to jump in, Alan, when you were Talking about a 20$25 minimum wage, the de gigafication of work, which is an incredibly important human rights campaign of our time. We need to be paying childcare workers 30 to $40 an hour, right?

Not just on the existential level of what does a CEO contribute to society, why does a CEO get so much more money than a child care worker? But because we finally have, after 35 years of Liberal promises, the effective infrastructure for $10 a day childcare across Canada.

And very few people are actually getting it because there’s a massive shortage of care workers.

And the other piece of it that we’ve been arguing for years, and these are the ideas lying around, this is the Overton window work that we’ve been doing for so long now. Care work is climate work. Care work is largely done by women, by women of color, by people with precarious immigration status.

Care work is low carbon. Care work is the connective tissue of society which holds the fabric together. And it is a low carbon green job. We talk about green jobs.

We picture a guy in a hard hat, always a guy in a hard hat putting up a wind turbine. Great, we need tons of that. We need a new grid to go along with it.

But the actual fundamental value of care work is, is that it could be the basis of our economy. Public investments are much more efficient and effective there. People’s lives improve immediately.

And the disability justice movement, I think, is the last great human rights movement of our time that’s never actually had its moment the way labor justice and racial justice and others. Not that we’ve won any of those of those fundamental struggles, but disability justice is a lens. It helps us see the centrality of care.

I teach climate justice at ubc. It’s the first time that a course called Climate justice has been taught there.

And I share a piece by Astra Taylor’s sister, Sonora Taylor, who wrote a brilliant book called Disabled Ecologies.

And the essay that goes into it talks about disabled landscapes and the fact that people with disabilities actually know something about what it is to have joy, to thrive, to survive, to battle through all the obstacles that our disabled landscape as we are moving into a period where the earth is disabled. We’ve done that and we can’t undo it.

But there is a wisdom and a deep ethic of care and attention that we desperately need to learn from disabled folks and from the disability justice movement. It’s a life skill on a damaged planet. And so I think this ethos of care is fundamental.

And it’s yet another place, Alan, where the left can actually be asserting something that is, does that speaks to something universal in people. That speaks to the dignity that we want for our elders, for the panic that we feel for our kids, and for the love that we feel for each other.

And you know, there is a really, there is a universal framework, movement, philosophy, ideology, that can be built on the foundation of care. And it’s just waiting there for us. Just hang in there and everybody needs it.

You know, the whole thing about Tommy Douglas’s dream for Medicare, you think eyes, teeth, mental health and medicine is not part of your health. We’re only halfway there.

I mean, we’re privatizing the shit out of what remains of our public health care system, but that we never actually got the whole thing. And go down the list, Care is the missing piece in every part of the economy. So care, care, care. Jesse, thank you.

Right on.

Thanks for the chance for that.

Do you mind if I change the subject, Alan?

Go right ahead.

Hetty Fry.

You know, not everybody is running up against a veteran of politics, a very popular politician, but someone who, correct me if I’m wrong, is on the left of the Liberal Party. Right. So again, I can’t.

What does that even mean? I don’t know.

Fair enough.

Is Krista Freeland to the left of Mark Carney? What do these things even mean when you’re talking about.

I would say no to that question.

Well, Hetty’s a big supporter of Kristia, so.

Okay, fair enough. What do you think of your opponent when you’re going door to door, other than speaking to the big issues? Are you having to address the incumbent?

Because incumbents have a lot of power in politics. They do. Even if I agree the center is collapsing. I think liberalism is in an existential crisis.

But nonetheless, I think fear of America, fear of poliev, is already causing people to look past issues and to focus on really silly stuff. So before we conclude, I have to ask you, like, how are you handling your opponent and how does that factor into your campaigning?

Well, I, I hope it won’t surprise you that I have a rather old school approach to these things. I’m weary of the politics of assassination, of character assassination and nicknames and all this stuff.

I, as much as I can laugh at my kids Jimmy Kimmel list, I, I, I, I really think it’s, it’s toxic and horrible and it’s, and it’s damaging. I mean, who would Want to go into politics. It’s. It’s. It just seems so smug and ugly. And so I got a lot of respect for Hetty.

She’s the longest sitting MP in the House of Commons. She’s won 10 elections.

It’s. Well, yeah. I mean. And the last Conservative elected in Vancouver center was the first female prime minister. Yes.

So I hope Hetty remembers that because it was an important moment for us all. And Kim Campbell, like, let’s give a little love to Kim Campbell here.

She famously said that elections are not a great time to talk about issues, and she just got absolutely excoriated.

Yeah.

You remember this, Jesse? I think you were. I think you were nine, but I’m.

Much older than that, but please continue.

And I went on record saying, when is telling the truth become bad politics?

There you go. Right? Yeah, it was. It was. It was a sad moment. Maybe it wasn’t a smart thing to say in an election, but, you know, it’s not. It’s not. It’s not untrue.

I have a lot of respect for Hetty and not gonna trash her. She was elected a long time ago. So long ago that I was on Muchmusic when she was elected. And that is a very long time ago indeed.

Although, you know, if we really wanted to get an audience with this podcast, we would’ve been talking about much music the entire time. But please continue.

Do you wanna hear about my Bon Jovi interview? Do you wanna hear about. Like I can. I’m happy to go there.

No, we want Moses dirt. Everyone wants Moses dirt. Sorry, Avi, please.

Oh, yes. No, no. Now you’ve got me distracted. That’s what I want. I. You know, I discovered in.

In learning a little bit about my opponent, that she was a crusading doctor in the HIV AIDS in the 80s, which was really important. So, yeah, she’s got. She’s got a special sauce. And this is not a small thing to try to flip a riding. What.

What I know and what I hear every single night at the Doors is that people want change and that people of this riding don’t want the Tories. I mean, I don’t think there’s a single in the current configuration. Very, very volatile liberals seem to be coming back now.

Who knows what it’ll be in a few weeks time. We may be in an election in a few weeks time.

I don’t think there’s a safe riding in the country from a conservative surge, but I do think that Toronto Center, Vancouver center, some of the really, you know, deep downtown ridings of the urban spaces of our country are less likely to elect conservatives. And if people want to change and they, and they want, and they still want progressive representation.

I have a huge amount of energy as your back end open source platform probably is buckled under the weight of what I’m screaming at my little remote mic here. And, and, and I have the, I have a passion for, for Vancouver which comes from, you know, the zeal of a convert. I, I didn’t grow up in this city.

I have fallen in love with the city. And it is the most beautiful city in the world. And it should not be just a playground for the rich.

It should not, we should not be driving out the working class soul of the city already. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s gentrified way more than it ought to be. And there’s so much to save here.

And Vancouver is like a symbol for so many of the challenges facing urban centers around the country and around the world. And this is where the rubber meets the road.

I mean, we have to fight for people to actually have a roof over their heads, have food that they can afford, and have an economy that’s not dominated by a 300 pound gorilla which is threatening us on a daily basis. And, and the fight is right here in Vancouver Center. So I welcome it. I’d love a chance to debate Hetty.

I had her on Counterspin a couple times in the late 90s.

Unfortunately, the deeply careless executive producer of that show erased my entire oeuvre from that era after I’d asked for it a number of times over the years. But I did. In this very apartment, which we’ve taken over from my in laws, I found a cabinet filled with VHS tapes.

When I was the new boyfriend in the 90s, my beautiful in laws taped a lot of counter spans.

Right on.

So I have a little bit. And I’ve been searching through those to see if there’s a clip of me and Hetty. I haven’t found one yet.

Well, I didn’t have the total collection. I had a digital archive, you know, of the show that you should have mentioned. I don’t know.

I don’t know if I have it any longer, but it’s probably in my hard drive closet, so we can follow up on that.

Let’s do it.

I have two final quick questions. Alan, do you have any last questions before we start to wrap up?

Go ahead.

The first in terms of donations, because I have to admit I’m not fully clear on this. Can people outside of the riding. Donate to your campaign.

Absolutely. I mean, jump on board, Jesse. Half the country’s donated to my campaign.

No, I’m flat broke.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.

But this is where I bring up, for Those watching on YouTube, Avi’s Vote Avi ca. And check out his website and donate because as he mentioned, money does matter in politics.

Yes, indeed.

So I very much wanted to make that clear so that our non BC listeners can appreciate that.

No, no. And you know, I have long relationships in different movements around the country, and I’ve been doing work nationally for.

For three decades or more, and it’s been really heartening to see the support from across the country. I feel really blessed to have it as a candidate because a lot of. Of unelected. Don’t. But.

And, and people also phone bank for me from around the country. Like we’re. We’re just gearing up the kind of national push.

And there will be a few ridings across the country where there’s the infrastructure, and we’ve built it here in Vancouver center to actually onboard people from anywhere. And the time change works in our favor for once.

So people in the eastern time zone can make phone calls at dinner time BC without staying up as late as we would need to for you.

Yes, yes. And then finally, the guilt trip that we often do at the end of every podcast is where we ask the current guest with help for future guests.

Oh, shit. I just got the time change completely reversed. No, you have to be a night owl. Excuse me? Yes. Yes, you have to be a night owl.

So, Jesse, all your friends can call. I was gonna say midnight. You’re on your end. That’s right.

Yes. So to get to the ask.

Yeah.

Can you put in a good word with Naomi to come on the show and. And talk about the way the shock doctrine is being played out?

No, you guys don’t get the Klein. I’m sorry.

Okay.

No, second. Hardline. Hardline.

Second. Since your facetious. No, there was not met with the humor you had intended.

Well, I totally acknowledge that there is a huge difference between federal and provincial ndp. If you have a friend who has a friend who can get word into Merritt Styles that we would love to have her on the podcast.

Oh, I’ve done that through other friends of friends, but obviously, as the campaign is going, it would be an absolute treat to have her join us, as highly unlikely as it may be. So again, I’m asking you if you know friends who have friends.

I think you two are both, you know, like emeritus heartland Ontario media personalities I think the pull is there.

Right on.

Well, the other thing, one of the older maxims in politics is that no one’s ever voted for someone they’ve never heard of. There’s 50% of Ontarians right now have no feelings about her one way or the other. And that’s her biggest opponent right now.

Yeah, and I’m personally in the chat rooms, I’m in having a hard time getting people to look at the NDP because on a provincial level it doesn’t have the same connection.

And I’ve been poking a lot of the candidates I know running for MPP to kind of engage in this digital sphere because to your point, Jung Meat does very successfully and it does make a difference. So again, if you could put in a good word that helps.

Helps.

Yeah, I mean, I, I think I, I suffer the same fate, you know, like people in Vancouver center, unless they’re, you know, truly aged virtually, you know, virtually, if not effectively retired like you two. I mean, how would they know who I am?

But we, you know, we have to, we have to reach people with the power of our ideas and the magnetism of our podcasts. I mean, that’s what, that’s how we’re going to bring the youth in the, in the door. It’s, you know, I just believe in talking to everybody the same.

I really do. Like, I just think I. The cynicism with politics is real.

I sometimes feel, I see sometimes a leader that’s struggling or whatever, and I feel like they’re trapped sometimes in technocratic the way that politics is done these days.

And I know I have a lot of freedom as one local candidate that, you know, to experiment, to iterate, to try things, to really, to really put the focus on organizing and talking to people. It’s not a guaranteed path and it’s not the only thing that works. You have to fight in the digital sphere.

You have to campaign in the air war and the communication space. It has to be all of the above.

There’s a ton of creativity and spirit and connection in this kind of politics. And. And I think it has all kinds of other benefits that right now the populist right is offering.

And so it’s connected to all the stuff we’ve been talking about.

Don’t want to keep you forever, Abby. But before you came on, we were talking about Matt, probably Price. Have you ever run across him in, in the Vancouver area?

Name sounds familiar, but I’m not sure.

He was very, very instrumental in organizing the Dogwood initiative. You talked about your canvasser who’s doing it for, for mental health.

I mean, he has developed a whole thesis around organization and agency and empowerment.

Instead of, you know, particularly a political campaign, you have your campaign headquarters and it does everything and you know, tries to get down to all those doors that on the street, he puts it exactly opposite. You know what your job is to find out who in this block is going to be the block captain. That’s their job.

You know, we aren’t you and, and giving these people a sense of power. You know, your job. There’s 48 people here. We, we got in the last election, we got six of them. You know, your job is to get nine.

Yes, and he said the difference in terms of both outcome, but also in terms of the sense of loyalty that these individuals have for the organization as a consequence of being, being empowered and having that agency is anyway, it’s again, something that we’re just kind of flirting around with as part of this whole social movement.

I think it’s fundamental. I mean, it’s so exciting. Like, you guys know, Big Organizing the Approach and Rules for Revolutionaries, written by Becky Bond and Zach Mallets.

The whole notion of trusting the base, giving people the keys, empowering people to do their own organizing. This is available not just to any political party or to any particular campaign, but to any movement.

And it really is, it’s a kind of politics that comes from a love of people.

And I think, you know, and there’s always going to be, you know, there’s going to be embarrassing mistakes and someone will say something gross in a chat and you have to, you know, or someone will turn out to be an unpleasant. You got to, you know, you got to, you know, self. Correct.

But the obsession with control and the idea that the base is a, is a, is an unruly force to, to be managed.

They’re just arms and legs.

It’s a dead end. It’s a dead end. People are too smart for it. People feel taken advantage. People want the agency.

And when you give them a space where they’re able to lead, you see them flourish and lead. And that’s when politics just is no longer a spectator sport, but it’s also a really compelling alternative to lying on the couch and doom scrolling.

That’s A fundamental problem.

Last question for me. If you had to guess, when are the writs going to be issued for the federal election?

Well, there’s a lot of talk right now that Carney doesn’t want to. I mean, I think it’s a given that Carney will be the leader of the Liberals and, and I don’t think he wants to recall parliament and not have a seat.

I don’t think, you know, one scenario might be they write a throne speech which is their election pitch and then they pull the plug before there’s even a non confidence vote on it. But he might just go. I mean the numbers seem to be going up for him. So he might be leader on the 9th and mid early March on the 10th.

Yeah, it could easily happen. We’re so ready. We’re chomping at the bit.

You talk about Kim Campbell.

I mean she did make some significant errors during the campaign and as Ike said, is that the voters basically reroute to conclusion they had reached two years earlier. That said she was the leader there for seven months during which she was ahead of the polls the whole time. Yeah, and you may be right.

It may be in Carney’s interest just to say I got a little puff of wind in my sails here right now. Let’s pull this plug, let’s see if.

We can keep it going. Yeah, you know, but that’s, that’s, that’s.

I mean it needs to be said that we’re also in an existential moment around how we respond to this brute force economic warfare from the United States.

And you got a 40 day period where, you know, people, people in Canada.

Love it when parties work together as much as, you know, people are mad at the NDP for propping up the libs and blah, blah, blah. And Polly have been just been going on about that forever.

If people love it when, when politics, political parties and classes come together and the notion that we could do that, recall Parliament, actually have a coordinated response, set down the, the, the assassination, character assassination machinery for a minute. I think Canadians would be thrilled at that. I don’t think people are hungry for an election.

It’s a terrible, it’s a terrible timing but you know, we’ll do what we got to do. But like, come on, this could be, this could actually be great if we, if we came together and had a response that restored our economic sovereignty.

I’d be, you know, I would even work with Liberals to do that. But luckily I’m not, I’m not, I’m not in the decision making. Chair.

Well, and since we are at an end, you know, one of the things we’ve been talking about in a rather alarmist way on this podcast is it could be worse. And that will require a kind of unity government, as it were, to mitigate that. So my last question is, you know, Avi, my dog’s willing.

After you’re elected and you become a real hotshot on the national political scene, will you still have time for us? I mean, will you come back on the podcast?

I like the way you’re building in the, like, the future guilt mechanism. Plant that seed, harvest it later. Of course, Jesse.

Right on.

Right on.

I didn’t even know what email was when you fixed it the first time.

Well, and this has been, I think, a fantastic conversation that really gets to what we’re trying to do here on Redtory, which is enact the Overton window shift that you are actively engaged in. So let us know how we can help. And thanks again, Avi. This has been really a fantastic chat. Vote Avi CA and AvieLewis CA.

And I’m saying that so the AI doing the transcript gets it right and puts the URL out there. Redtory. We’re on YouTube and all the podcast networks and of course, on Substack. And we.

We’ll see you soon, hopefully with an episode as fantastic as this one. Take care.

Thanks, you guys.