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Computer
You are listening to Sandy and Nora’s Podcast.
Sandy
Hey, Nora.
Nora
Hey, Sandy.
Sandy
Happy birthday.
Nora
Aw, thanks. Oh, my god. Can you believe it?
Sandy
It's amazing. It's great. I hope you had a great time with your family. And I know you've been traveling. So I hope you had some time to take to yourself. You finished your book. You got a copy of your book. I mean, your other book, not the book that you finished, because that would be weird. But a lot of great things happening for you. So yay, celebrate.
Nora
Oh, my god. And do you know what, Sandy? It was a great day. And getting copies of my book on my birthday was pretty wild. Also getting a beautiful poster from artist Ricky Krueger, who is a fan of The Pod and a friend. Ricky drew a picture of a whale dropping their keys for me in this beautiful painting.
Sandy
Oh, my god. What?
Nora
It's so charming.
Sandy
That's amazing. That is, I mean, your deep contemplation brought to some sort of life. That's great.
Nora
It's great. And do you know what? The other kind of amazing thing that happened yesterday, yesterday was my birthday. The Quebec City Tramway report from the case of Dépôt et Placement Québec, Infra, was just released. And they are recommending the same project that was proposed in 2018. So that has just come out today. And people are reacting to it. And it's pretty wild, pretty amazing. Only a week and a half ago, we were walking from end to end on a 27-kilometer hike to say, we want this tramway. And for the report to come out last night saying, yes, Quebec City needs a tramway, and this is what we're proposing, is pretty sweet. It's pretty nice to see something that's going to slap our government in the face. So fingers crossed that they just say, OK, fine. Go ahead. We're doing it. So I'm doing great.
Sandy
Do it. That's really great. And dear listeners, when Nora says yesterday, she means yesterday, because we are recording today. Yes, if you listen to this podcast on the day that it comes out, we are recording it today, on Tuesday, because we've both been traveling quite a bit. And so I'm actually coming to you from beautiful Alberta. I'm in Banff for the first time ever. And Nora, have you been to Banff before?
Nora
I have been to Banff. It is surprisingly magical, isn't it?
Sandy
It's unbelievable. I don't know if I have ever been in a place this beautiful in my entire life. I just can't stop staring out the window. There's no words that are effective to describe it. None of the photos that I've ever seen have ever come close to it. It's like taking pictures of the moon. The pictures of Banff are beautiful, but it is like taking pictures of the moon. It's not going to do it justice. It is absolutely stunning.
Nora
I know. And when I was there last, I had like two hours to kill, and I got myself a kayak. So I don't know if that is a possibility for you, but if it is, yes.
Sandy
No, Nora. No, no, I'm not doing it. I've never been in a kayak.
Nora
That's OK. You could just sit there and float around, looking hilarious.
Sandy
Absolutely not. No. That is not going to be my life. But I might try to figure out time at a hot spring or something like that if I can.
Nora
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Oh, my gosh.
Sandy
That would be nice. That's more my speed.
Nora
Well, that is so wonderful. And the mountain air is just whispering off of your voice. And I love that you're there.
Sandy
Yeah, me too, me too. You know, I'm feeling a lot of gratitude for being in a space like this. And I'm feeling like giving out some gratitude, too.
Nora
Oh, my god. Yes, me too. Thank you to everyone who supported the podcast this past week or who supports the podcast in general. You folks are amazing, and we obviously couldn't do it without you. Especially this week, thanks to Darsha, Autumn, Basil, Ro, and Christine. Thank you all so much for your support.
Sandy
Yes, thank you so, so much. So not too far from me in Calgary, man, what a week it's been. Have you been following that news about the water main break?
Nora
You know what? I was just in Edmonton. And in solidarity with that city, I ignored Calgary. So no.
Sandy
Well, there was a really, really terrible water main break in Calgary that has affected the major feeder of water to the city. And there's all of these advisories that people need to reduce their water usage or the city could run out of water. And so that, I mean, the infrastructure catastrophe that that represents is such a terrible, terrible thing. And I mean, a couple of days ago, they were saying that it could take two to five days. I was speaking to some folks here who are familiar with how the infrastructure stuff works in Calgary and who think it's going to be much, much longer. So that's kind of terrifying and really, really terrible.
Nora
Yeah, you know, that's the thing about decay is it's like, oh, wow, shit just falls apart. And it's funny, too, because regular maintenance, staying on top of stuff, that was kind of the norm of it.
And it really hit me while I was in Edmonton and I was staying in a hotel, the Shadow Lacombe, which is a nice-ish hotel. They wouldn't do our rooms, even if we had asked, any more often than three days in a row after three days. And it's like, we can kind of laugh about how, oh, you don't need your sheets done every day or whatever. And that's obviously true. But there is a general maintenance that has to happen to maintain spaces. And whether that's public infrastructure or private infrastructure or private spaces, cleaning and maintenance or whatever, it's just amazing to see every little bit of slack cut out of the system. And when it touches our water, it's like, oh, it'll be OK, until it's not. And I hate it. Like, what the fuck, I hate it.
Sandy
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really terrible. And I mean, it's also, I mean, that what you're talking about, this is like a broader problem of how the turn that politics has taken in this era of politics, in that there is really no political incentive or interest in maintaining what has been built over generations, or even, in some cases, making it better. The political interest, in terms of infrastructure, is making something new and shiny, which isn't always what we need. In many cases, and I think we saw this a lot during the pandemic, in many cases, what we need is upgrade to what we currently have. And there's no incentive to do that. And of course, politicians would rather have rhetorical fights over nothing at times than actually working to make sure that our infrastructure can serve us and serve our livelihoods in the way that we need them to.
And so for everyone who's continuing to be affected by that in Calgary, oh my gosh, that just seems so awful. So I'm hoping that that gets fixed sooner rather than later.
Nora
And of course, I mean, water in this country is very political. And for all the communities in this country that don't even have access to clean water still, I mean, it feels like just yesterday that Justin Trudeau was promising to fix all of the boil water advisories or all of the water problems that existed within water systems on reserves across this country. And of course, that hasn't happened. And in the past week, I don't know if you saw this news, I did mention on the Daily News, the final report on missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, it came out five years ago. And the commissioners from the commission have been decrying the fact that almost none of the 231 calls to action have actually been implemented.
And so it's like, once again, here we have the liberal machine that a huge part of their brand was to repair Stephen Harper's broken relationship with Indigenous people by actually doing these things. And the inquiry was a big part of that. And then what, nothing, nothing, almost nothing, pretty much nothing, budget cuts to the two ministries that deal directly with Indigenous people, Indigenous services in this country. It's just like, the march towards fascism is paved by liberal intentions.
Sandy
Yeah, and it's the same sort of politic, right? Shiny new thing, which is the report, lots of photos. We're doing great, folks. Give us a hand, a round of applause for all of the shit that we've done, which is nothing. It's a report of things that, quite frankly, some of them are that you should have known that you needed to do for some time now. And then there's no incentive for them to do anything because of the way that our politics works besides doing the right thing and the fucking liberals have shown again and again, and many of our politicians have shown again and again, doing the right thing is not an incentive that they give a shit about.
Nora
No, no. And we're actually seeing this logic play itself out in two different, though more extreme cases. And I think that that's what we're going to mostly talk about on this episode. The decay that is wrapped up in liberalism leads to violence and state repression and fascism. And we have no better examples of that on the slow slide towards fascism as the most recent elections in the European Union Parliament, the European Parliament, where there's been this wave of right-wing and fascist and proto-fascist and near-fascist or fascist-adjacent members of the European Parliament. And then, of course, the violence, the genocidal violence that we're seeing in a liberal democratic state, air quotes, like Israel.
And it's really, really interesting, I think, for us to have a conversation about all of these things together and how the lie of liberal capitalist democracy was always telling us that this was not going to be the end game or what would end up happening. And yet, here we are. And so I want to untangle a lot of this stuff. And I also want to take on the question that I saw someone kind of pose theoretically or rhetorically, which is like, well, isn't this just proof of the left being incompetent or unable to win or unable to convince people to vote for them? If fascism is having such a moment, this is just so clearly a failure of the left. And it's like, yeah, I think so, but also, is it? I don't know. Help me kind of untangle some of these things, Sandy.
Sandy
Well, I always get kind of frustrated when I hear that sort of analysis. Like, this is a failure of the left.
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Sure.
Sandy
I mean, OK. But what good does it do us to discuss or think about the political landscape as though the really effective right-wing machine doesn't exist? You know, it's not just like a failure of the left. It is a monumentally effective campaign by very wealthy people. It's a monumentally very effective campaign by fascists, by white supremacists, by people who really benefit from making sure that we slide into a world where more and more people have less and less.
And I don't think it benefits us to have the conversation as though it's like, oh, man, here's the left just fucking up all over again. We need to, like, what does that do for us? But like, I don't know, make us feel like slightly morally superior, but like, ah, look, we've analyzed it a way that we fucked up. I think, like, sure, like, let's do what we can to make sure that we are effective and are appealing to a majority. But we also have to understand what is happening from the right and attack that as well.
Nora
Right. So what is happening from the right? As you said, there are forces that are very powerful and very well-resourced. Now, part of the kind of difficulty in all of this, of course, is that the liberals are very well-resourced, and they are backed by corporate power. The conservatives are backed by a different kind of corporate power, but it's all the same thing. And both see the left and left-wing ideas as an existential threat, as a threat to the very operation of how things go in the current Western liberal capitalist order.
But the problem, of course, is that for that order to have worked, there has to be shared resources. There has to be services, and people have to have their needs met, because if they don't have their needs met, they're going to move towards radical politics. And as the markets that control a lot about our lives, so everything from where we live, to what we buy, to where we work, and how much we work, and how much money we have, and how much money we don't have, as we have divested our own national power over these forces, our own sovereign power over these forces, we are increasingly integrated in global forces.
And so we don't have the kinds of control that you need to have to be able to build a nationalist project that allows people to actually share the resources and live in a level of comfort that is what Western capitalist democracy was built on. And as those pieces fall apart, there is an increase, of course, of militarization. There's militarized responses to the population. There's militarized responses to protest. And it's all because it's not just capitalism, but it's racial capitalism.
And so, I mean, I don't know if you saw this this past weekend, but one of the vice presidents for CIJA, the Canada-Israel Jewish Affairs Committee, was talking about this walk for Israel they had in Toronto, which is an annual festival that happens annually, obviously.
Sandy
Yeah, that makes sense.
Nora
Yeah, OK. And so this guy, Richard Marceau, he was like, look at the difference. Our rally, families, fun, no violence. Look at their rallies. Masks, terrorism, violence.
Sandy
Oh my god.
Nora
Yeah, and of course, if you've ever been to a Palestinian rally, I mean, I imagine it looked very similar. It looks very similar to what the walk for Israel looked like. It's just people walking around. Families are there. Fucking people can wear masks if they want. That's not violence. But this insisting on creating the dominant white norm as a way to try and hold together a society when the society is falling apart, I mean, the obvious result of that is fascism. It's not going to go in any other direction than that if that's how we're talking about issues in society that are where people find themselves on different sides.
Sandy
Yeah, and the other thing, too, I mean, god, those comments are really frustrating. It's like, fuck, you have all these examples of people having their jobs stripped from them or opportunities stripped from them as a result of going to rallies in support of Palestinian people. Like, yeah, and being attacked by police. Like, yes, there is going to be a difference. And why are you placing them as though they're, I mean, this is an annual walk. Why are you placing them as though they are two sides of one coin?
So anyway, leaving that aside for a second, I mean, the other thing here is the great failure of the idea of a political center and the, like, smokescreen that that has been in our societies for so long. Like, there is a way to have a political neutral, a center, a political reasonable amongst all these unreasonable people that is predicated on the idea that when we disagree, we must compromise and find a way in the middle so that we can all be happy. But that obviously is not going to work all the time. That's not going to work when you're talking about a genocide. It's like, OK, well, let's hear both sides and see where we can meet in the middle. No, that doesn't work.
And a failure to actually have a politic, principles that are underlying what it is, what actions that we are taking, doesn't lead us anywhere. It allows the right to pull and pull and pull, because there's always going to be someone who's like, OK, well, let's compromise so some of them are happy. And I think, I mean, if it hasn't been clear to folks before, I think it is abundantly clear now that a political center is not, I mean, it's wildly unethical. And it's lazy. And it's not real. It's not real. We really need to be assessing our political movements, where we're going, what political, what policies we're implementing as a society from a place of principles, and where it's going to take our society, rather than, well, you know, I'm a good guy, and I just want everybody to get along. And that means I'm going to listen to you, and I'm going to listen to you, and we're going to find a place in the middle. Because it doesn't fucking work.
Nora
No, it doesn't work. Because the middle has always been this way to distract from the fact that radical politics are attractive to people, whether those politics are fascist politics, or they're socialist politics, or let's say they're right-wing politics or left-wing politics. The center has always tried to obscure the fact that people, when they are engaged in politics, are going to have very strong opinions and feelings about the way that society should run, and that they want a society that is efficient. Now, one of the sides is a society that's efficient, where power is concentrated and top-down, and there's probably a lot of repression to keep people in line. But it's not surprising that people would move towards that as a solution when they're embedded and invested in capitalism.
So it's like going back to this question of the left's failure. We're trying to argue the same kinds of things with an average person, but when we're talking about socialism, it requires talking about a break with capitalism, and a break with the status quo, and a break with everything that's implicit in that, in ownership, and borders, and property, and all of this stuff. And so it's a little bit more difficult to have that conversation. And of course, our own institutions are in disarray, and there's a whole bunch of, we do have many failures that we have to account for and try to overcome. But it is very, very, very fascinating to see in Europe, in a place that is the center of this capitalist project globally, Europe and the United States, the owners of the current hegemony over which, under which the world has been captured for a century and more, is now crumbling into fascism.
The same people who just refuse to allow their borders to be open, who refuse to figure out ways to operate that are just, and kind, and ecological, and hopeful, and that it just crumbles into this disgusting thing, I think that we could call barbarism, right? Like, it's always been that question.
Is it socialism you want, or is it barbarism that you want? And liberals, because they're so tied to capitalism, they're so tied to the status quo working, they'll choose elements of barbarism every fucking chance they get over choosing elements of socialism. And if they choose elements of socialism, especially right now, where everything is financialized, where every single interaction that we make with another person that is outside of our friends and family is financialized in some way, then they will look for ways to financialize those just, and caring, and service-based systems that underpin our society.
Now, what's really fascinating, of course, is that there are new modes of doing things that are emerging around the world. And there are amazing shifts happening, and politicians getting elected. Like, we mentioned last week in Mexico, where they're suggesting that things are changing, that there is a different way of doing things. But we're still left with, well, of course, right now, the biggest example of all of this, which is this horrifying genocide in Gaza that is, at the heart of it, based on white supremacy, territory, territorial expansion, access to resources. And it is kind of interesting. Like, I wonder how many people are kind of so shocked by what they're seeing, because they just thought that all of this was a thing of the past, that we had become enlightened enough to no longer do these kinds of destructive things.
Sandy
You know, I would imagine that there are a lot of people who are surprised, because they don't see the ways that it continues to happen in places like Canada, and the United States, and other settler colonial states. And I think that there's a choice that we have in the way that we talk about Israel, and whether or not we make it clear that this is a continued example of something that we've seen all over the world time and again.
And if you are sitting in Canada looking at what's happened, do you somehow relate that to what has happened here, where you live in this land, and what is happening here, where you live in this land? And I think, you know, it's our responsibility. Like, ethically and principally, if we are understanding things from a principled place, you do need to implicate Canada, not just in the ways that it's supporting Israel, but in the way that it also serves as an example of a settler colonial state that people can point to. And that is something that needs to be reckoned with. Like, how is it that you understand what is happening right where you are?
Nora
Man, that's a big question. You know, it was fascinating watching the coverage for this Walk for Israel this past weekend because, well, I mean the coverage. There wasn't much coverage because it's an annual event. And you know, if you've ever studied journalism, you're always told that annual events are not news, which I was always angry about because it's like, come on, Labour Day, it's news. But anyway, whatever. And of course, sometimes that rule is definitely broken.
But there were some interesting comments made online about how, like, if you're present at this march, let's say you're walking for Israel, and there's obviously raging racist Islamophobic piece of shit among that crowd, as we saw some expressions of that. But is it possible to be in a crowd like that and support Israel, but be opposed to what the nation is doing, or the government is doing, or your army is doing? And you know, when you step back, and because, I mean, you could say, no, it's not possible. That's incoherent. It's not possible. Certainly not possible when you have a march like that the day after a massacre. If you had any principles at all, the march would probably be canceled to condemn what Israel has done as people who love the country. Like, you know, I love this country. I want it to continue. And what you're doing is actually sowing the destruction of it, obviously, but anyway. So the march goes on, and there's tens of thousands of people there. And people say, but not all of them agree with what Israel is doing.
And while it's hard to, I think, I think it's hard to make that argument, I think it's hard to believe that argument, it is very interesting if we step out of that argument and say, OK, but what about Canada? And can you celebrate Canada and Canada Day and leave aside all of the bad stuff that Canada is engaged in, that Canada has been engaged in, that Canada will continue to be engaged in? And I think when we place it into Canadian terms, it actually becomes a lot more clear that there is a very obvious limit to the Canadian nationalism that tries to uphold what is the myth of Canada as being this enlightened, open, free, safe place.
And the reality, which is that actually, not only is it not that for everybody, as we should all know, but it's getting much, much worse. And people's security is getting much, much worse. And your chances of getting killed by a police officer are not just increasing, but of course, they're much higher if you're black or if you're Indigenous. How do we navigate saying, Canada is great, but, or using our Canadian identity and saying, as a Canadian, this is bullshit. And actually, I'm going to do everything I can with my Canadian identity to actually fight to change these things. And maybe the timing of this conversation is great, because you're all planning your Canada Day barbecues right now.
Sandy
Yeah, yeah, I mean, where my mind goes immediately is step back, zoom out, zoom all the way out, and really think about what we're saying. If we're talking about a Canada or a Canadian identity, or for that matter, Israel or Israeli identity, or anywhere else. And actually, to be clear, not everywhere else. And I'll talk about that a little bit in a second. But what we're saying is, by the accident of fucking biology, I was born in this space that some Europeans some time ago unethically slaughtered many people to get here, and then unethically brought a whole bunch of people to work that land here. And then drew a line and said, here, you're Canadian. And now I have to be proud of the things that are past that line. It's like choosing a sports team to root for. Like, what does it mean? It doesn't mean anything.
Now, I think what people want, as a Jamaican, I understand deeply being attached to one's culture, and being really proud of one's culture, and wanting to uplift that culture. And that doesn't need to be tied to the state. But Canada as a whole doesn't really have a coherent culture, I would argue, except for a culture of like, we must respect this line. Everything that is here, I mean, God, we don't even contribute in our society to culture in a way that makes sense in terms of supporting people who are working in cultural sectors in Canada. No, the thing that ties people together in Canada is the settler colonialism and the racial hierarchies that exist in the country.
And so when you're confronted with, are you proud to be a Canadian? What are we talking about, actually? What does that mean? Like, what cultural pieces are we talking about? I mean, I recall in primary school this, I don't know, anxiety over that when this would be taught to us. It's like, we are, what are we? We are different than the United States. Not really, like somebody drew a line. And it's very much the same culture. And so what does all of that mean? I mean, gosh, I think to me, it's like the problem is the borders. The problem is the borders and our understanding of what land means and of land ownership and of regulating people and their relationship to land.
Nora
Well, it always comes back to that. It always, always, always comes back to land. And especially in a settler colonial place like Canada, the legitimacy that we even have to say that this land is Canadian is so tenuous. I mean, there's parts of Canada that never were ceded, that Canada literally never actually signed properly to take over. I mean, we can say that the treaties themselves were also signed under duress, and they're questionable or whatever. But there was at least a thing. There's also parts of Canada where there's literally nothing. And still Indigenous people are fighting for their sovereignty and their governance against a state that says, no, this is now our land.
We are in this place where the land is your ticket to wealth. The land is your ticket to profit. And as, I think, Fanon said this and wrote about this, the connection of colonized peoples to their land, to the way that people existed on their land for time immemorial, and the language that comes out of it, and the culture that comes out of it, and the commerce that comes out of it, is really, really important. And when you have a body that is supplanted from somewhere else and just dumped into this new land, we don't have that same connection to the land. Now, we might have a connection to the land for various reasons or for various, like having been in a certain part of Canada for generations or doing a certain kind of work for generations in our families. And so we might feel a very close affinity to that land. But at the end of the day, our institutions don't.
Our institutions are the ones that are happy to say to the United States, yeah, you know what? You can open as many mines here as you want. Pay mining companies directly, and the people that live there can go to hell. Or just dig out the volcanic rock in that mountain. It's no big deal. And actually, the tar sands, it's not a huge problem. There's not that many people that live there. Go wild. Paper manufacturing and the methylmercury that's in the water, don't worry about that too much. We're going to mitigate it. It's going to be fine.
Don't worry about the folks at Grassy Narrows who have multi-generational trauma related to mercury poisoning. I mean, trauma poisoning and trauma related to mercury. If our institutions treated the land differently, we would be in a completely different paradigm. Completely different paradigm. And then maybe under that paradigm, there would be a Canadian-ness that could emerge that is not tied to the state, but is tied to a different paradigm. And maybe in that paradigm, there would be a different appreciation and need or whatever to fund and to foster culture and to create things that actually are telling stories about us that we can see ourselves in, that we can see our realities reflected in. But that is not the paradigm of most, all modern settler colonial states.
And so it's one thing to see Israel bombing a refugee camp and killing 300 people, and that's horrifying. But we know that the same thing happened in Canada. We know that there was mass, mass, mass murder. We know that. And not only was there mass murder, but if you go to any large city today, the genocide is happening on the streets of those large cities. We're so broken from reality on this stuff that you realize that the level of brainwashing that comes into living in a settler colonial state like Canada is really powerful. And then, of course, it explains why so many people would see a walk for Israel as being a cultural event that isn't necessarily endorsing the foreign policies of a particular government.
Sandy
Yeah, and even in terms of mitigating our relationship to the land or regulating our relationship to the land, I mean, you just gave a number of really great examples. But then there's also the way that humans interact with the land, not as institutions that are extractive, but as people. We are super regulated in our access to land, which it seems so normal. But it's actually a fucking wild thing that is just really, it's a really wild thought that we have had to have embedded in us. It's as wild as regulating access to water or regulating access to air, which things that I know are things that governments are doing now. But it is still something that we can look at and be like, oh, yeah, that is a little bit weird.
And here I'm talking about things like our access to the land, our relationship to the land is all regulated through immigration measures. Like, do you have a right to this land? To our, whether or not we are of a settler colonial background, or whether we are Indigenous to this land. And through immigration and through people who are literally imported to work and have less rights because their relationship to the land as regulated by the settler colonial state will not allow them to have the same rights to protection over their fucking bodies as they pick the food that the settlers then eat.
So when you ask, are you supportive of a Canada? How can you not take all of that into account as something, I mean, that is the core of what Canada is. You can say it's about, you know, maple syrup and Tim Hortons. But that's, I mean, that's not real. Like, the existence of maple syrup is a cultural thing that does not belong to like the settler colonial state of Canada. That's not, you know, like that's not a pridefulness of Canada. You know what I mean?
And so when we're thinking about that as, you know, Canada as a settler colonial state, it's like, you know, what is the solution, the idea of land back? It's like, in some ways, it's like, oh, my God, can we stop pretending that we, that land is this thing that someone can own, can own and regulate and just let people have a relationship to one another and to land.
Nora
And this is what I think trips us up a lot on the left, because any reform that operates within the capitalist paradigm that doesn't challenge all of this is going to be a dead end. Now, there was a hope. I, you know, I think in the post-war period where redistribution of resources and wealth and changing the way that things had been done previously created a hope that you could reform bad structures into being something better. But the second that Canada opened itself up to the global markets and attached itself directly to the United States, that hope vanished. Because then all of a sudden, that press for money as it is tied to land just went, you know, went off the charts. I mean, look at how many foreign companies make tons of money off of the exploitation of the land in Canada, off of resources, off of real estate, off of all these things.
Then, of course, we have our own Canadian corporations that do the exact same thing and that don't give a fuck if they are, you know, pushing someone out of house and home if it means that, you know, a rental increase of 5%. Like these companies are not nationalists. They don't give a, they don't give a fuck about Canada. And they want us to be nationalists. We're not paying attention to what they're doing to us. But this is the limit of the logic. Because if we can accept that liberal capitalism will always slide towards fascism, and we are seeing very clearly those slides towards fascism happen, and all of these Canadians who are looking up here probably ever going, oh my God, we are so fucked under this guy. And it's like, yes, we are.
And that is going to be also Canada's slide to fascism under the cover of the classic red Tory, progressive conservative cloak, as in I'm for working people, except he's obviously the fuck not. Then as left-wing people, we have to recalibrate and say, okay, like any time spent on reforms has to be done extremely intelligently. Like, is it worth it? Is this a thing that is going to help enough people to make us wasting our time on this issue worth it? And will we be able to build for something more radical beyond this?
This is kind of the spirit that I'm seeing at a lot of the Palestinian encampments, so the students that are setting these up, that are trying to model a new world through a camp. And I think that that is so hopeful and so amazing that therein lies the answer to a lot of these things, which is that society in and of itself needs to be completely reoriented.
We need new paradigms.
We need new myths.
We need new understandings of ourselves and our relationship to the land and the way that capitalism is destroying us. And in absence of that, every single left-wing campaign or reform is going to be a failure. This is why we can tell you right now that the NDP is fucked and is not going to do anything and is just going to slide us further to the abyss, right? Because there's absolutely no appreciation in the approach to politics to fundamentally change things. And if we don't fundamentally change things, then we're cooked. Like, then that's it. And I think that there's a lot of hope in seeing the world in this way. It's why, like, you know, I meet with people all the time and they're so scared of Pierre Pollievre, and I'm like, who cares? Like, it's going to be different, more of the same. Like, the fundamental problems don't actually go anywhere with a changing of the guard, as we can see with, you know, how much experience, we have 130 years of experience in this country's democratic system.
Sandy
Yeah, yeah. And, you know, it all comes back to the principles of why we do things and making sure that we understand things from a principled standpoint. And, you know, bringing it back to the encampments on college and university campuses, I mean, is a really great example, Nora. Like, when they are saying, you know, we want divestment, like, yes, you can see that as an economic argument or like a not in my name sort of argument, not with my dollars, but you can also see that as poking holes, like in a principled way in like a capitalist system that says you can't have a rigorous education without some sort of connection to like war and defense manufacturing, which doesn't make sense. Like, think about that. That is so weird. That's weird.
It doesn't fucking make sense, unless, I mean, principally our society is like deeply, deeply attached to a capitalist system where everything has to benefit the makers of industry and wealth, and through that, a capitalist war machine. Like, it doesn't make sense. And so having that principle and understanding that orients you to what to attack in the day-to-day when you are struggling for justice in any way.
Nora
And I have to just correct myself. I forgot that it's not 30 years ago. Canada's about to turn 157.
Sandy
Ha, ha, ha.
John Kameel Farah outro
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