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BIGGER THAN ME PODCAST
159. Jonathan Kay: The Shocking Evolution of Political Correctness
Jonathan Kay and Aaron Pete explore the balance between cultural sensitivity and open dialogue. The two focus on political correctness and Indigenous issues, delving into the history, language, and current debates surrounding these topics.
Jonathan Kay is a Toronto-based editor for Quillette, a host of the Quillette podcast, and author of the Deeply Problematic and Let's Get Board substacks. Follow him on X at @jonkay.
Welcome back to another episode of the Bigger Than Me podcast. Here is your host, aaron P.
Aaron Pete:Political correctness and Indigenous issues are hot topics within Canadian culture. Today I'm speaking with somebody who understands these issues, talks about them thoughtfully, and we discuss the book Grave Error. My guest today is Jonathan Kay. Jonathan, thank you so much for being willing to join us today. Would you mind briefly introducing yourself?
Jonathan Kay :Sure, my name's John Kay, I work for Quillette and I write books and do a podcast and run Substacks, all kinds of media stuff and I live in Toronto.
Aaron Pete:I'm going to ask to start by taking us back. Four years ago you did a TED Talk on political correctness. Would you mind defining political correctness from your perspective?
Jonathan Kay :Political correctness, which now seems like kind of an antique term.
Jonathan Kay :What's kind of interesting actually is, just now that you mentioned it, I'm just reading a book Now that you mention it.
Jonathan Kay :I'm just reading a book by somebody who actually defines the origin of that term and describes how, until the late Cold War period, politically correct used to be used as a term of praise in socialist or communist circles to indicate that someone's comrade had correct political views which properly reflected Marxist-Leninist tenets or whatnot.
Jonathan Kay :And, as is often the case with some of these things, a positive term within that movement then got co-opted as a negative term by conservative critics who saw a lot of the things that were being praised as correct as being these rigid intellectual dogmas that were uncritically accepted by the cadres and, uh, so over time it became an insult, right, um, much in the same way as woke. I mean, woke has followed the same pattern, right, it was, I guess, as recently as the sixties or seventies or eighties. Uh, you know, maybe even, maybe even far more recently than that, you had people who were proudly saying that they were woke to the need for more social justice. It was seen as something people bragged about, I guess, and then in the last five years it's become an insult. The term politically correct has followed the same trajectory, although obviously that was a previous generation before woke.
Aaron Pete:That was actually going to be. My next question is have your views or perspectives on political correctness or whatever term we're using in today's kind of approach? Have they changed at all?
Jonathan Kay :Yeah, I mean like so when I was in college I'm older than you I went to university in the late 80s and the 90s. You know people would use the term politically correct as an insult to describe ideas that I guess today would seem sort of common sense. Like, you know, don't tell sexist jokes at work, don't tell racist jokes. You know, don't wear blackface even if you're Justin Trudeau, like it was what we, what was then denigrated as political correctness. I think in retrospect it was like people putting some fairly reasonable boundaries around discourse. You know when, when I was younger, you know you could get away with some pretty vulgar and offensive stuff when you were talking to people. I remember it was pretty common at my university guys would use the word gay and it's oh, that's so gay which no one would ever do. Now, right, it's completely insulting.
Jonathan Kay :So you saw the term politically correct then describing used as a term of abuse to describe stuff that I think in retrospect is a lot of. It is fairly reasonable, okay. So yeah, views do change and I mean even like a lot of the stuff we call woke, probably like 80 or 90% of it is kind of nonsense, but there's always a grain of truth to this stuff, or 90% of it is kind of nonsense, but there's always a grain of truth to this stuff, like it's always true that you know you should be courteous and respectful when you're talking to friends and colleagues and stuff like that. And there are contexts where pronoun checks are, you know, can be useful Probably not in your email signature and stuff like that. But yeah, I try and keep an open mind and say to myself, right or left, there's always a grain of truth to every ideological movement. You just have to trim away the excesses, right.
Aaron Pete:Interesting.
Aaron Pete:One of my favorite parts of your TED Talk was around this idea of using your social capital for good, and so you referenced that you're a Jewish person and that you were able to call out certain things and say that's not anti-Semitic.
Aaron Pete:In certain circumstances, I feel the same onus as a First Nations person and a council member for my community, that I have to be one of the voices to push back on some of the extremes that we see come out of this, like land acknowledgements, like land back terminology.
Aaron Pete:To be mindful and cognizant of the fact that we see come out of this like land acknowledgements, like land back terminology.
Aaron Pete:To be mindful and cognizant of the fact that if we let this train go too far, people are going to hop off and and have a negative reaction to kind of what's taking place and we have to find some sort of middle ground that advances and makes it a more fair society but that doesn't go way too off the tracks where people have to say a land acknowledgement every single time they have a 15 minute meeting, or where things just go way like I don't agree with land acknowledgements on their face and so I have to be willing to say that and the response I get from people is like thank you for doing that. I don't feel like I can say negative things about it, so I appreciate you being willing to do that. No, I think it's unfortunate because it somewhat puts the onus on the person who's trying to push positive things forward to start calling out negative things. But I really liked that because that's what I feel in my day to day is that I have a responsibility and an onus to do that work.
Jonathan Kay :That's a really interesting point and I think, especially in the current political climate, it's a busy job for somebody like you, because you know some of the more prominent voices in the Indigenous community and often they're prominent because white politicians make them prominent, because they act as convenient props for them when they want to demonstrate their adherence to reconciliation or something. They're the ones that get fronted by the CDC or stuff like that, and so maybe it's not quite as lucrative or quite as attention-getting when you're the person who's maybe a more reasonable voice and say, hey, we don't have to say a land acknowledgement every 15 minutes. Yeah, and as a Jewish person, you know, I mean I first realized this, like when I was working at the National Post. I remember every year B'nai B'rith would put out the survey of anti-Semitism, right, and every year it was like the same story, like anti-Semitism is skyrocketing in Canada. Anti-semitism is an epidemic, and you know, I'm a Jew who's grown up in Canada and obviously antisemitism exists, like in the same way that anti-Indigenous racism exists, like it's never possible to completely get rid of bigotry. But I mean, year after year I would see these B'nai B'rith annual surveys of antisemitism and I was like how is it possible that antisemitism is like skyrocketing every year, when, as a Jew, I feel like fairly safe in Canada and I feel like antisemitism is decreasing? And so I was the one on the editorial board of the National Post who was then charged with writing editorials, maybe expressing some skepticism about this B'nai B'rith stuff, with writing editorials, maybe expressing some skepticism about this B'nai B'rith stuff, whereas I think, like my non-Jewish colleagues would have felt less comfortable about that.
Jonathan Kay :No, I mean problem is you can take this to an extreme right, like in the United States, there's these black public figures who like they kind of make a name for themselves as like pro-Trump types, who like go overboard on some of this stuff, like racism doesn't exist at all and like they kind of become, to my mind, sort of co-opted by people who have a vested interest in their message. And you see this in all communities, right. But that said, it's really interesting what you said about the indigenous community, and I think this kind of feeds into what I was saying about how there's always a grain of truth to stuff. Like, again, I'm older than you and I grew up in Montreal in the 70s, that's my.
Jonathan Kay :My political conscience has probably started in the 80s and and the way people talked about Indigenous people in Montreal their only contact with Indigenous people was driving out to reserves to buy cheap cigarettes, and so they would talk about them in a fairly racist way and it was a good thing that there was a backlash against that and people said, hey, let's learn about history, let's educate ourselves, let's talk respectfully about people, and I think it's a wonderful thing that the kind of discourse that existed about Indigenous people and many other communities that was normal back in the 80s is stigmatized now, like you're not supposed to talk like that and that's a good thing. But then, like all movements, it kind of goes too far and then the policing of language becomes kind of its own objective and you get a whole class of people whose careers and platforms are based essentially on policing speech, and that's a bad thing.
Aaron Pete:Agreed and seeing this firsthand the first time I started to see land acknowledgments are based essentially on policing speech and that's a bad thing. Agreed and seeing this firsthand. The first time I started to see land acknowledgements become popular was in universities, where I'd see a professor pull out some napkin and say I'd like to acknowledge that we are on the unceded ancestral territory of the Coast Salish, and it was just like you have no idea what you're saying, you don't know why you're saying it, you don't care.
Jonathan Kay :Can I just interject there Because I don't know if you know this, I don't know if your listeners know this, but I actually we had a big Quillette event in Toronto and I wrote my own land acknowledgement, which I was very proud of, because what I found is, at this event that we did, it was like downtown Toronto and, as a lot of some people may know, downtown Toronto was like the site of a battle in the war of 1812 against the Americans, and what I discovered was like, right on the site basically where we're having our event, um, the, the British side, or the Canadian side, won this battle and it was largely thanks to the heroism, the military heroism, of the British Indigenous allies. And so, when I said my land acknowledgement, I said let us be inspired by the feats of arms of these soldiers who defended us from the Americans, including some of these famed indigenous warriors and I think I named two of them who you know. Without what they did, we might be part of the United States now. And so let their example inspire us to build a Canada that is more free and more equal and more race-blind for generations to come, because, I mean, if you do learn the history, you can draw inspiration from all sorts of people, especially some of the incredible exploits, like military exploits of indigenous auxiliaries that fought defending what's now Canada, and that's the kind of thing I'd like to see people more educated about.
Jonathan Kay :The problem is, a lot of the education that takes place around minority communities tends to be very sentimental. So people will educate themselves about the Jewish community, which I appreciate, but a lot of it is kind of you know, they're educating themselves about the Holocaust and about anti-Semitism, which I think is valuable, but it's often very victim-centric and a lot of the stuff you see about Indigenous issues. It's like people say, oh, I've spent years educating myself, but often they're learning like the same three things over and over. They're learning about residential schools, they're learning about anti-Indigenous racism, like they're learning about colonialism, but they're not learning about, like a lot of the fascinating and amazing things that made indigenous communities viable before European contact, like their methods of warfare, their methods of you know food production, their methods of habitation, like you know, the way they build homes, which you know. When the Europeans arrived, they died of starvation and they froze to death because they didn't have these skills that Indigenous people have Like.
Jonathan Kay :To me, that's the interesting thing about Indigenous history. I like to learn about the bad things, like residential schools and stuff, but you have a whole generation of people who that's all they're learning about, and often they're learning about it in a very like kind of torqued and sentimental way, which they're not really educating themselves, like they're kind of educating their own, moralizing so like they feel they can adopt the right political posture, but that's not real intellectual education, right that's. That's kind of more like a religious thing. Um, so yeah, that's one of my pet peeves.
Aaron Pete:Yeah, I've heard that said from elders, that like if you're learning about those pieces, you're really learning Canadian history, not Indigenous history, which would be for the past 10,000 years. Some of our stories and that's where I've gained a lot of knowledge is just like I've listened to Jordan Peterson break down the Bible and then being able to take my own teachings from my community and the stories we have and start to try and pull out the psychological value of them and understand them in a deeper way to how that would have guided generations. And one of the pieces that I find really interesting is that our moral stories about how to live a good life are literally painted onto the landscape in which we live. We have a mountain and it has a name and that name comes from the story. And the story teaches us both how to live a good life but also how to get to that mountain and how to kind of traverse the terrain, and it serves dual purposes, which I found really fascinating.
Jonathan Kay :So obviously, jordan Peterson is a particular. He's particularly interested in religion and especially Judeo-Christian faiths. One thing that just sounds so interesting in regard to spiritualism and the European-Indigenous divergence there's this amazing podcast by a guy called Greg Cable. It's called Nations of Canada and he focuses really heavily on the Europeans but also on the Indigenous communities, and he has this amazing part where he talks about the Catholic priests who came to Quebec in the early 17th century and they embedded themselves with the Wendat, the French called the Huron. And it's just so interesting because unfortunately we don't have written records from these Indigenous communities because these were preliterate societies so they didn't leave texts. But because these Catholics who came from France were so obsessed with, like, converting indigenous people to Christianity, they studied indigenous languages very closely and they studied indigenous spiritualism very closely. I mean, with a very cynical motive they wanted to convert them to Christianity, but still they studied them because they wanted to. How do we convince these people of how awesome Catholicism is? And it's? There's so many interesting things.
Jonathan Kay :One super interesting thing was the Catholics. They recorded the fact that the indigenous people they spoke to were very weirded out by the subject of heaven, because the priest would say if you act correctly, if you have faith in God and stuff, you'll go to heaven. And the Indigenous audience members would say, oh, that's awesome, but what about our friends and family? And the priest would say, oh, they're on their own. And the Indigenous audience members said, well, wait a sec, how is it heaven if I don't have the people I love with me? Like they had a very communal-based idea of what's good and what's bad and I listened to this podcast last year and I'm actually serializing it for Quillette and I was like there were tons of observations like that where I was like that's a really interesting point and it's true, I don't want to go to heaven if my friends and family aren't there.
Jonathan Kay :Like it's not, like one is better and one is worse and these priests were evil and the indigenous people were like these wonderful flower children who, like you know, knew the true meaning of goodness.
Jonathan Kay :Like it was done in this way, showing both of these peoples were products of their, their geography and their culture. You talk about the mountain, like a lot of the reasons mountains and streams and rivers and forests were revered as they were, like it was a source of food and you know you had communities that were rooted in these areas for a long time and they didn't have a portable culture because they didn't have the written word. So it wasn't like the Jews where they could, you know, wander around the Middle East and bring their culture with them. Their culture often was rooted in the landscape and so they developed. This, like these very rich oral histories and modes of spiritualism and I love studying it when it's not presented in a moralizing political context, like history is just so fascinating if you strip it of the sermonizing and the hectoring that just so often accompanies a lot of the political dialogue in Canada right now.
Aaron Pete:I couldn't agree more.
Aaron Pete:One of the things I learned in law school was around this idea of oral cultures versus written cultures, and one of the values oral cultures can provide is that you actually learn and absorb the information.
Aaron Pete:Where you might ask how many people in their 20s understand Shakespeare, just have read it, but kind of understand what the meaning behind it was, you start to disconnect from the oral, from the written culture in a way you don't with oral cultures because it's passed on and it's told in a way that resonates and if you misunderstand, you have somebody there to kind of re-explain it or help you digest the information and make it applicable to you.
Aaron Pete:And I think that that's something that we need to grapple with. And I always am hesitant around the term decolonization, but there are things I think Western culture can learn from Indigenous culture and the language and how we approached things, particularly when we were talking about land acknowledgements. One thing I think would be really valuable for people to do is learn the mountains and streams and things around their region that they live within so that they can better take care of it into the future. If there's an opportunity to put a big garbage barge right near their home community that we maybe say that's not a good idea and start to protect the things we care about within our region. That's different than, I think, how land acknowledgements are typically done, and yours is also an example of how you can go outside of kind of the status quo and do a better job kind of communicating these key issues.
Jonathan Kay :And, yeah, I mean, the reason I said that example in Toronto is because it showed like you can, it's possible, depending on the context, to acknowledge the indigenous presence on a particular piece of land, but you don't necessarily have to put it in opposition to the existence of like modern society, because there is a sense. It's like something like the undertone to many land acknowledgements is this used to be a wonderful, beautiful place and now, look, it's just like this crap hole that european has ruined which. But, to be fair, in some cases is is the case Like, I mean, if, if you had a beautiful Valley and someone turned into a strip, mine like that's, that's kind of fair. But on the other hand, there are plenty of examples of the opposite that you know it's. It's interesting because British Columbia has.
Jonathan Kay :I was in British Columbia a couple of days ago, actually visiting a friend. I was on Victoria, I was on Vancouver Island, I went to Victoria and then I'm going to mispronounce it Tawasin, is that how you pronounce it? And I don't know if you've been to the Tawasin Mall, but it's owned by the local First Nation, right, yeah, but it's like, it's an amazing mall, like it's a really. Have you been there? Yes, okay. So it's like this absolute first rate mall with like all the stores you'd expect. And I remember thinking, first of all, I think it's like great that they have this, what seems to be a flourishing retail enterprise which presumably like helps fund Tawasin First Nation right. But also like when I was there I didn't think, oh, oh, wow, these first nation people have really decolonized the idea of a mall. I was like indigenous people are like anybody else. When they see a good idea, they take it like they don't think, oh, you know, let's, we're gonna strip down the idea of a mall. It's just gonna be a bunch of people like selling stuff out of huts and like you know, it's gonna be barter and there's gonna be no money and no credit cards, like you know.
Jonathan Kay :So whenever I the term decolonization is a problem for a lot of reasons. One of the biggest problems is like most people don't want to decolonize stuff. Like if you're an indigenous person who wants to get the best experience at a university, you know you want to get the best experience at a university. You know, you, you want to get the best experience at a university. And if somebody sits down and says, oh, we're going to decolonize the university for you and like we're going to spend half our time, you know, learning the Salish words for, like you know organic chemistry terms and all that stuff. You're like, well, really, like that's why I spend all this money to come to university is like to get lessons I could get from my relatives, like that's not why I came to university. I don't necessarily need that from you, that's something I get from my community members. But you know that mall which I'm just holding out as an example of like the successful retail establishment, there's a lot less of that. I would say that people in Ontario see Quebec is a little different, because Quebec does actually like partnerships, going back with the Cree and Hydro and like but century in terms of resource exploration, like this stuff with these.
Jonathan Kay :Actually, I have a bone to pick with BC because it's because of that political struggle and I'm not even going to try and pronounce it. It starts with W, but someone told me how to pronounce it. What's one? Yeah, yeah, where basically it was a political divide between the hereditary chiefs and the elected chiefs. Someone told me how to pronounce it the uh, yeah, yeah, um, where basically, basically it was a political divide between the hereditary chiefs and the elected chiefs Correct, and that dispute somehow meant people in Eastern Canada couldn't get on a train for three months.
Jonathan Kay :Like cause there was. This is back in 2020, when they were setting up all these barricades, yep, and I was like great, up all these barricades and I was like great, I can't take a train to Belleville because these people are arguing about political decisions in British Columbia. And, of course, you had all these people, all these white people, on the streets here in Ontario putting their stakes down with the hereditary leadership in BC, because they were the ones who were like anti-LNG or anti-resource extraction. Yeah, stuff like that makes me mad, because the people who are shutting the train system down in eastern Canada, they didn't understand what was going on there. They didn't understand the sort of little civil war that was going on within that community.
Aaron Pete:Yeah, I want to jump into other conversations, but just on this note. That's a very interesting case and the first time I saw it pop up was with Evan Solomon, Ellis Ross and Pam Palmiter and they did a power play session where they were talking about this issue and Ellis Ross was breaking down like my people are in poverty and we need to address this. And this is an avenue in which we can raise people out of poverty, address the sexual interference against children in my community, start to solve some of these very real issues. Pam and Paul are coming from a university, coming from that social class, and saying like no, we have to respect their right to say no to this. And there were a few things that came out of that for me.
Aaron Pete:One it's so clear, if you look at it from at least a Western perspective, that one is a democratic process. Electing your chief in council is a is a democratic process and for the most part, everybody agrees that's the process that we should go with. The hereditary chiefs are passed on these positions and pay no consequence for holding those positions because they're not elected or held accountable to anybody but themselves, and that's a system for the most part I think we agree doesn't work over the long term. But I would say that so many chief and councils are still stuck in this family process, where you elect your family members and then they go and represent you as a chief and council representative that we haven't fully embraced the democratic process of having all candidates meetings, having debates, putting forward a formal platform.
Aaron Pete:I was the first in my community to really say I'm not going to run on my last name, I'm going to run based on a platform. This is what I say I'm going to do and you can hold me accountable in three years as to whether or not I did it. And then the other piece was around how we discuss these complex issues, because the pipeline can benefit many communities. But how do we kind of understand that? And I was so hesitant during that time where roads were being blocked and stuff to accuse the people who are upset and saying terrible things as true genuine racists and I do know that those people exist, but somebody driving on their way to work and somebody's in your way and you say a stupid thing I don't think we can define those people as long-term, long-standing racists.
Jonathan Kay :Honestly. First of all, you get behind the wheel of a car, you lose 40 IQ points and you see this all the time where, like I, you know, I know I've seen people I know who are like the furthest thing from racists. But as soon as some guy cuts them off on the highway, they like suddenly they become like you know, if the guy you know has like a Greek flag on his car, it's like you, fucking Greek asshole, you know, go back to Athens. Or you go fuck a sheep or whatever. Like you know, it's like this. You'll probably edit this stuff out. But, like you know, just like the craziest racist stuff comes out of their mouth as soon as they're behind the wheel and someone like cuts them off or tailgates or stuff like that, Like it's just this, this human tribalism, this reptile brain takes over. And yeah, if you're late to work or dropping your kid off in daycare and someone puts a whole bunch of garbage on the street and says, hey, you can't use this road because of something that's happened 3000 miles away, yeah, I'd be pissed off too. Um, you know, probably watch my mouth because I don't want it on Twitter what I say. But and, by the way, I'm just gonna.
Jonathan Kay :I know you know you want to move on to other subjects, but this thing about hereditary chiefs like it's the hypocrisy is crazy because progressives rightly, I think there I acknowledge I grew up in a fairly wealthy Montreal home and I have inherited privilege. You know, I've, my parents had some money and I went to good schools and that's privilege. But then somehow, like all those lessons about inherited privileges like get forgotten when it comes to taking the sentimental view to like, oh, you know, the timeless hereditary powers of Indigenous people passed on from grandfather to father to son, Isn't it beautiful? It's like, wait a sec, you know, I thought you were against inheriting stuff. Like I thought you know, you wanted estate taxes to be 90% so that everyone started from like the same baseline and there was no inherited privilege. And I thought you hated the monarchy because you know that's like the ultimate manifestation of inherited privilege, right? But somehow, when, like, indigenous people do it, it's like that scene from Moana where it's like the father takes the daughter up to the mountain and says you know, each of our leaders has put a rock on this hill and you shall be the next leader, and it's like, oh, isn't that beautiful.
Jonathan Kay :It's a hereditary kingdom where it's like, wait, but we're supposed to not like that stuff. Like, and you know it's true, I um, I'm probably a hypocrite too, because you know I I'm interested in british history and I like learning about the kings and the queens and stuff. But you know, so human beings are fascinated in this hereditary stuff as a matter of history. Like it feeds into our tribal impulses about how society should be organized. It's like like, oh, I knew your father and I knew your grandfather and so I trust you because you come from this lineage. Like that's a lot of how we're trained to think, but it's not consistent with democracy, right, and it's not consistent with meritocracy.
Aaron Pete:Agreed In 2014,. You wrote about the former national chief, sean Atleo, and his comments that his grandmother had a dream that we would not pass this on, this anger and pain, onto future generations, that we would look at the past and understand it and learn from it, but we wouldn't pass on that pain, and now it's referred to as intergenerational trauma and I'm just wondering if you can share your perspective on learning about Indian residential schools and hearing some of those thoughts, because to me what that chief said now would be very unpopular.
Aaron Pete:The culture has somewhat shifted on that note, and I'm just curious as to watching this play out for a long period of time.
Jonathan Kay :So, as with everything, there's like more than a grain of truth in this Um, you know, one one thing that really resonated with me is I went to, um, uh, I think I was in Fort Albany. Um, this is, like you know, near James Bay, um, ksheshwan and Attawapiskat are the more famous um or well-known communities there. Because of some of the crises that took place, um, during the Idle no More period but I remember talking to I think it was the chief at Fort Albany and I remember he said something really which I never thought about. He said we were talking about residential schools, and this is before the current political climate. And he said look, residential schools were good for a few things. They were good because I learned English, I learned math and I was able to, you know, do things like interact with government ministers and demand things for my community and write petitions. And now I'm using, like you know, I have no problem with email and computers and all this stuff, and, you know, not just because of residential schools, but a lot of it was, he said.
Jonathan Kay :On the other hand, I was also separated from my parents and family for long periods of time and, as a result, I and other people in my community we didn't have the parenting skills and so it's just like when you see a lot of this stuff you know, with alcoholism and drug use and maybe like other problems that affect all societies but certain First Nations communities it's they're tragically more common A lot of this comes down to like we don't realize parenting is a skill and, like all skills, it is, at least in part, learned from modeling the behavior of the people above you. And if you're not exposed for a long time to your own parents, then you don't necessarily have a model for how to be a good parent. And he says it's. You know, if you have one or two people in the community who have that issue, that's life, that happens in all communities. But if, like, a community is made up of people who all have that gap in their parenting knowledge through no fault of their own, that has a huge effect. So this is a god, this is.
Jonathan Kay :When did I do that report? I mean this was more than a decade ago, but I mean that really resonated with me because I've heard white people say you know, I had no father, I grew up in a foster home, like, like I said, the reason I was, I had problems as a parent is because I didn't know how to be a parent Like. I've heard that from people from all backgrounds and so that really stuck with me. On the other hand, the stuff about intergenerational trauma, you know I remember Jagmeet Singham of all people. You know the guy who got driven in a limousine to a US private school when he was a kid. He talks about the seven generations of intergenerational trauma, which for me that's like this political thing. It's like, oh great, so seven generations, what is that? That's like 150 years or 200 years. So that means I, as a descendant of Russian Jews, should still be boring everybody around me about the pogrom the Cossacks were coming through my village, you know, because that's what happened to my great, great, great, great great grandfather. Like that that becomes a fetish. It becomes a fetish that you're holding on to for all these generations.
Jonathan Kay :And you know I've educated myself a little bit in my history. And you know I've educated myself a little bit in my history. Like my grandfather basically was a refugee and my grandmother too was a refugee from Russia because of the horrifying anti-Semitism there, went to China. Their area of China got attacked by the Japanese during the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and there was a ton of violence against everybody, including Jews, and there's people dying all over the place. And then, essentially, my family became a refugee from violence a second time, which is how my father left China and made it to Canada as part of a big like, essentially, a prisoner exchange, because my, my grandfather and my, my aunt, got thrown into a Japanese prisoner of war camp uh, like horrifying violence everywhere. Then my prisoner of war camp uh, like horrifying violence everywhere. Then my father built a new life in canada.
Jonathan Kay :I don't suffer any intergenerational violence like my, I think, my father does. He's still alive and you know he, he doesn't really like to talk about stuff that went on in china, um, and the violence that went on there, um, and you know, I know it's, it's probably affected him in ways he doesn't talk about, but I don't hasn't affected me. I've lived a great life in canada, but completely insulated from all this stuff. Uh, and that's only one generation and the idea that, like, there's this sort of congenital, intergenerational propagation of trauma to me is ridiculous. It can happen. But the idea that it's like something we should expect, to me that's a political pose. It's like saying, you know, hasn't happened to me, didn't happen my father, didn't happen my grandfather, but I'm still going to play this card because, you know, maybe my great, great, great grandfather. It happened to him and so it affects me in some, some way.
Aaron Pete:I don't buy that yeah, and I think you did a very good job in writing about this and talking about this issue, because I think from my perspective, there's a few issues. One is there's kind of a famous saying hurt people, hurt people, and it should be noted that a majority of people who get hurt do not go on to abuse other people. It's a very small minority of people who end up like repeating those harms onto other people, and so there is, to your point, this opportunity to transcend the issues that you faced in your life and put them in the past, and that's not an easy task, but it's an important task that people take on. The other piece that you described is that, like for my community, a majority of our members who live on reserve live on social assistance, so they can't go to their neighbor next door and ask how do you become a doctor, how do you become a nurse, how do you become a lawyer? And they can't go to the neighbor on the other side because everybody's in the same boat.
Aaron Pete:And the thing that I've watched and tried to understand more of is this hopelessness. And I had the benefit my mother was a part of the 60s scoop, which is a bad thing. My grandmother was a part of St Mary's Indian Residential School. But the value add that my mother got from being a part of the 60s group was she lost her culture, which she's still trying to recover from today. But the nurse who took her in from Coquilita Indian Hospital raised her and raised her with Catholic values and raised her to believe in herself, to work hard, to grow as an individual, and what that resulted in was me growing up somewhat disconnected from my culture, but understanding the two worlds.
Aaron Pete:One person lived in a very nice home, there was always food in the fridge, there was this high quality of life, and then I'd visit my reserve and see the complete opposite People just struggling to survive, people miserable, abusing alcohol and getting.
Aaron Pete:That two-world view gave me hope that I wanted to go in the direction of where people were financially successful, comfortable and lived a good life and were able to give back to their community in a healthy way, and so I'm trying to bring the philosophies and the tenets from this world back to my community. So people aspire to be greater than they are and aspire to have good jobs and get a good education and be proud that they've contributed to their community, because people, I think inherently want to do that, but when you're told that the government's held you down, that there's nothing that can be done, that you're stuck here and people wanted you to be stuck in, the situation is incredibly discouraging, and that's what that chief was talking about is. We have to recognize this, but we have to encourage people to think beyond these constraints and I feel like you just you did a very good job in that piece of breaking down that philosophical approach and, again, things I don't hear about in the mainstream very often.
Jonathan Kay :Well, I'm glad you found that article interesting. I, I mean, I confess that probably like a lot of pundits or opinion writers, I I probably like, especially earlier in my career, I wish I'd spent more time like going out into the world and witnessing things rather than sitting in a desk. And you know I was on the editorial board of the National Post, so like I was paid to kind of just sit around and give people my opinion. But like, especially since COVID, I've spent so much time going around Canada and meeting people and talking to people and like seeing the geography of Canada and like one story that really really hit me hard it's the Algonquins of Barrier Lake. It's a somewhat obscure community, kind of near the Quebec Ontario border, really like well, I haven't followed this story for a good decade but like at the time I researched it was like very a lot of challenges and poverty and there was one story from that community where you had somebody who grew up in the community, who who left the community and became, if I remember correctly, like a carpenter and a contractor and an entrepreneur and learned how to build houses and became accredited. I think he went to trade school, I think in Ottawa, in or around Ottawa, if I recall, and then went back to his community. I think some people call it ABL, I don't know if that term is still in usage, and this is according to one account. So I that caveat and it was kind of like, hey, I've learned how to, I have all these job skills now and I notice there's this housing shortage in the community. I'd love to help build stuff and maybe bring houses up to code. Often there's these tragic fires that take place in First Nations communities because there's either no fire code or the fire code isn't observed. You know there's a lot of mold in the basements because you know ventilation and hvac systems are um are not kept to code, that people don't have fee simple ownerships of their structures, so there isn't the same economic incentive to to do preventive maintenance in homes and so there's a lot of fire hazards and like a lot of the stuff he wanted to help um.
Jonathan Kay :What was interesting? Like not everybody was on board with that. Like there were a lot of people in the community who are like, hey, wait a sec. Like we have a system here and the system is when things get shitty, we, we like we ask for more money from for new homes and you know we have to deal with all these bureaucrats, but eventually we get more money and we build new homes. So, like you know a lot of the stuff you're talking about, we're not like maybe as interested as you and eventually and this is a story like he's kind of run out of the community, like people like what he was advocating was not part of the politics of the community, which were, were based on like another pattern which people were kind of locked into. Yeah, and it wasn't. They weren't locked into that because they were indigenous. They were locked into that because we are all creatures of economic incentives.
Jonathan Kay :And you know, I grew up, I'm in a part of Toronto called East York and if you know, if somebody put a fence around East York and said everybody in this community we're going to, you know we're going to give you all the social assistance and you're not going to go to university because you don't really have to go to university and, as you say, your brothers and sisters don't go, your neighbors don't go to university, like your social expectations would be. You're going to kind of live the life that you're. I'd end up like that, like it's not. Not, it has nothing to do with race. It has to do with the economic incentives you're presented. And this really is people talk about, like the horrors that were inflicted on indigenous people. This is one of the quiet horrors, the creation, and it wasn't done deliberately. But basically you take peoples whose economic system was based on like going out into the world and collecting resources and building things, and like hunting animals and following the hunt, like that, and you say no, no, you're going to be the sedentary community, we're going to build the houses and you know your economic way of life is going to be destroyed. But don't worry, I'm sure you'll find something to do and in the meantime, you know, we'll give you the bare necessities of life. Like over the years, if that becomes the lifestyle, men have no social function. Like the women have a social function, they raise children, but the men have no social function and they lack self-esteem, as anybody would. If you have no economic or social function within your community and there's no answer to that, like the progressive answer to that is oh, you know, they're just. These communities are just going to flourish. If we give them enough like positive encouragement, they're going to.
Jonathan Kay :It's like no, that's kind of not how human nature works, like people need an economic function in life and if they don't, it doesn't matter how much. Like cultural, you know how many language programs or you know how many ngos you send or how many consultants you send, um, you know humans need a sort of the natural tension that comes from producing economic bounty for themselves and their families, because without that the societies fall apart. And you see that with rich people, like you know, I I know tons of rich people here in toronto, like trust fund kids whose lives fall apart because they don't like you see it, at the high and low ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, people who lack the economic tension that comes from having to provide for themselves. They lack dignity, they lack discipline. You know drugs and alcohol become a problem in life. Child care, you know, suffers Like it has nothing to do with race, it has to do with your economic incentives.
Aaron Pete:I couldn't agree more. I hold the housing portfolio for my community and when I joined I basically said the 89 homes that we have on our reserve have severe health and safety issues and I would not feel comfortable living in, and we heard stories from people saying that the mold and mildew that their kid inhaled for years caused kidney issues and they had to have one of their kidneys removed and these types of issues and it's a serious health issue and easily, you know, it's one of these things like an ounce of prevention or a pound of cure.
Jonathan Kay :But you know, I live in the side. If I didn't own my house and pay a mortgage on it and have to worry about its resale value, I wouldn't do any preventive stuff here, like, if you know why, why would I? You know is, but because I I do all this stuff, because I have an economic incentive to do so, and God knows what. My house would be a complete dump if I, if I weren't worried about you know, not just health and safety inspectors resale value, you know, and the fact I'm taking my cues from my neighbors. You know, my neighbors have nice houses. So I'm like, oh, I better better make my house look good. And oh, shingles are falling off. I better call like, um, it's. You know I I've been to not I've been to houses on a fair number of first nations communities, um, and I'm kind of sometimes just shocked at how little investment in preventive care would have been required to remedy some of the issues that are going on with those houses, especially in regard to ventilation, basement care, and part of it is just a lot of these communities are in heavily flooded areas.
Jonathan Kay :So look, these James Bay communities, these communities, these First Nations peoples, were pushed around by white people and often put on the crappiest land, land that floods seasonally. And when you have seasonally flooded land, guess what? You know, basements flood. And so these problems are exacerbated by kind of the racist policies that caused a lot of these communities to end up like a lot of First Nations nations reserves. They're not on traditional lands, they got kicked off their traditional lands and they got put on lands that white people didn't want. Yeah, and so that exacerbates a lot of these housing issues that's exactly my community.
Aaron Pete:We were moved from our original location, which was out of the floodplain, into a spot that now we've had. Northwest hydraulics confirmed that we are deep into the floodplain and likely to flood during the 2021 atmospheric river in BC. We were severely impacted and now we've repaired 22 of those 89 homes and we have a plan to repair the rest. But you see that that's to me, the first step is supporting people and, to your point, we didn't have the exact same issue. But a lot of members' initial response to repairing homes is well, do they pay their rent? Because we shouldn't fix homes unless they're paying their rent.
Aaron Pete:And, to be clear, within our community, rent is usually $350 a month. It is not a lot of money and from my personal perspective, when I joined I said I would not feel comfortable living in this home, so we are going to fix it. Then we can address the rent issue. But $350 is not a lot of money overall and I'd rather see people living in a quality home and we can have that discussion later than focusing on that. But that was so much the dogma and the culture of getting mad at people for not paying their rent rather than kind of saying well, like nobody should ever have to live in a circumstance like this, like this is unacceptable and we should address that. And then we can get into the financial issues.
Jonathan Kay :One of the interesting things about what you say is I have a theory that even if it were $50, people wouldn't pay, because I find a lot of human nature is you take your cue from what your neighbor does. So, like during the Greek financial crisis this is like 10, 15 years ago, probably more the problem was Greeks weren't paying taxes and when they interviewed people they'd say well, you're a rich guy, why don't you pay your taxes? He says, well, my neighbor doesn't pay his taxes. And what am I? A sucker Like no one wanted to be a sucker. Because if you believe the guy next door isn't paying his taxes, we have this like instinct that says I don't want to be the sucker.
Jonathan Kay :Um, and so if you're in a community where where maybe, maybe it's like you know, you get together with your neighbors and they're all grumbling and say, yeah, I've got all these problems, why I'm not going to pay my rent this month or whatever, like it discouraged, even if you live in a nice home, it discourages you from paying rent and says, well, am I going to be the only guy paying rent Cause? So it kind of creates a social norm and these things like can spread very quickly, like social norms can spread like wildfire, for good or for bad. And if a social norm is created that says, like only suckers pay rent, then like we complain here ontario, like landlord has become a dirty word. Um, but the good thing about having a landlord is like a real landlord, like a sort of a capitalist evil. Landlord you know, so to speak, is they will throw you out if you don't pay a rent. So like it creates a certain discipline and you know your neighbor is paying rent because he hasn't been thrown out of his house and you know your other neighbor is paying rent. So as much as you don't like paying rent and as much as you hate your landlord, at least you know that everybody else in your apartment building is also paying rent, so that when you pay rent you don't feel like a sucker.
Jonathan Kay :So you say I don't like playing paying $3,000, $3,000 a month for a two-bedroom apartment in a marginal area of Toronto. That sucks. But at least I'm not a sucker, at least everybody's doing it. Like capitalism, love it or hate it, capitalism does create that kind of norm where you know it's an arm's length arrangement, whereas my understanding of a lot of First Nations communities is politically it's very difficult to throw somebody out of their house, right, small community where everybody knows each other. It's like do you really want to be the chief or the council member? Who's like sorry, miss Smith, you know, go sleep in the woods. Like you're probably not going to do that, right, yeah, yeah so.
Aaron Pete:So I find that you have a lot of nuanced perspectives on First Nations and Indigenous issues. So it was interesting to see you involved in the book Grave Error and I'm wondering if you could share first, maybe, how that opportunity came about.
Jonathan Kay :So the book Grave Error, which has become like this infamous thing. You had some mayor in BC who was like they told him he has to resign because his wife recommended the book right.
Aaron Pete:Yeah.
Jonathan Kay :Uh, so plus some someplace in Northern BC. Which town was it?
Aaron Pete:Uh, cornell's dealing with it right now. Yeah, that's it.
Jonathan Kay :Yeah, but like the wife recommended it for her, her book club and the mayor was told he has to resign, so that book, I think there's at least one essay that was reprinted from Quillette. Two, two essays, yeah, and those essays which originally appeared in Quillette are about the same subject, which is that, as I'm sure probably everybody listening to this podcast will know, in May of 2021, three days from now, actually the third year anniversary it was announced that the Kamloops I'm not going to say presence of 215 formerly unknown, unmarked graves of children who they said had attended residential schools, and the implication was that these are students who had either been murdered or dispatched or hastily buried in some way after dying of neglect, and it was treated as again everybody listening to this will know as like the story of the year. In fact, canadian press actually formally voted it as the story of the year. And then you had other First Nations communities who indicated that they had conducted their own ground penetrating radar, gpr surveys, as it's known, indicating what they believed were also potential unmarked graves. The story absolutely did serve as a reminder of a lot of the terrible things that happened at residential schools. However, there's no indication as of yet that any of those 215 graves actually exist Because, as has been documented and pointed out, gpr survey data indicates soil anomalies.
Jonathan Kay :It does not indicate caskets or graves or human remains or bodies, but in the Canadian media that point was kind of confused. So I mean, to this day, people I meet, many of them who don't study this issue closely. They take it for granted that what that gpr data found back in 2021 was like little x-ray images of of indigenous children who had been killed, which actually isn't the case. And to this point it's been three years, not a single grave, let alone human remains, has been definitively discovered at a point that corresponds to the announced GPR survey results from 2021. Not in Kamloops and, as I understand, not in any other First Nation and, to their credit, several First Nations have taken it upon themselves to actually do forensic examinations. There was one First Nation in Manitoba. They investigated a church that local Indigenous lore had had it as being like the repository for all these murdered children and they didn't find anything. Although I've given the chief and council full credit for doing that investigation, my understanding is that in Kamloops to this day there hasn't been a full investigation of it because it would be politically explosive within the community, within the indigenous community and within the BC media and the national media, to say, oops, sorry, we made this announcement.
Jonathan Kay :The New York Times announced there was a mass grave, but it turns out like there's no bodies. And so the articles that I wrote, which were reprinted in that book, talk about the social panic that surrounded that, which I think is not healthy for the debate about what some people call reconciliation, because if you want to have something called reconciliation, it has to be based on facts. And if you're telling people 215 murdered Indigenous children were found in Kamloops, bc, in May 2021, and in fact there were no such bodies found like that erodes confidence. People are going to think, well, what else are you lying to us about? And and many of the horrors from residential schools are are the furthest thing from lies.
Aaron Pete:They're, they're all too real, but but now people who have discovered the truth about that it's it makes them skeptical can I ask about the other authors in other sections of the book I don't think are as thoughtful as you are in your writing and your approach? Were there any qualms you had about being a part of this or were you able to read the other excerpts? I've read through it and just some sections are just to me somewhat racist again and kind of approaching things from like a well over the past 150 years. First Nations have received $3 trillion over the course of that period and it's like sure. But if we added up Canadian economy amounts it's probably way more than $3 trillion. We're just kind of playing with numbers here. You can see the consequences of some of these policies. Did you have any challenges with being a part of the book or do you think it was just very important to get some of these messages out?
Jonathan Kay :I'm going to be completely honest with you. I haven't read the book. They asked if they could reprint the pieces I'd written and I said sure, the person who asked me. There were two people Tom Flanagan, from University of, or formerly of, university of, calgary, who I dealt with and published. He wrote a book called was it First Nations, second Thoughts this is like 20 years ago which was about the RCAP Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, and the other guy was Chris Champion, who is the editor of something called the Dorchester Review. Both are authors who I published and both are people who I trust. So, on that basis, I said yes, I haven't read the book. Like I haven't read the rest of the book. I know some of the other authors.
Jonathan Kay :If you're telling me that there's material in some of the essays that like just rubs you the wrong way and is like I actually you sound reasonable, I trust your judgment. Now I don't want to read the book and I'd have to like put up this thing on twitter saying like I distance myself from so and so what you just said about like I can't believe we're spending all this money on this we're spending on the most like that without like reviewing the passage in particular. Yeah, I I don't like, generally don't like going there as just as a rhetorical tool, although I probably in the past, when I was an editorial writer, I did because the National Post is a fiscally conservative outlet and so we focus on money. But I always tell people like I think I've said this many times if you know, the best problems in life are the ones you could solve with money, and if money were solving the problems that we're talking about, I would have no problem.
Jonathan Kay :I pay like 52% marginal tax here in Toronto. Like I pay a lot of tax and I don't if you follow my writing, I never complain about that, because if that money is going to people, you know, forget indigenous stuff, like people with mental health issues, a functioning healthcare system, paved roads, a military that we can be proud of and that we could deploy to, you know, places that need Canadian peacekeeping assistance. You know I don't mind paying really high taxes to live in like a Scandinavian style socialist economy, like I, just I I've never been a real huge fiscal conservative. And and in terms of you know, indigenous peoples, even according to the broadest definitions, I think they're like 4% of the Canadian population. The reserve resident population of Canada is probably closer to four or 500,000. If we're just focusing on the reserve resident population, if we were paying 50,000, 80,000, $100,000. If we're just focusing on the reserve resident population, if we were paying 50,000, 80,000, $100,000 per capita and that money really was like building the kind of life and opportunities that we want, I'd be the last person to complain.
Jonathan Kay :So when people talk about the amount of money that is spent, to me that's not, it's not really a good argument. Because if you, if you break something, putting it back together is really expensive and if you have a moral responsibility to help a community that you've, you've stolen their land, you've in many cases destroyed their culture, you've taken away their ability to be good parents by throwing them in residential schools. I don't, I don't really want to hear you kvetching about how much it costs to fix that, like it's your moral responsibility to fix that right. So that to me is not a particularly good argument talking about how much money has been spent. What I'm more concerned about is historical accuracy. You know, and I think progressives should be interested in historical accuracy because like look, if I can draw a metaphor, look how much the so-called 1619 Project in the United States has hurt the cause of social justice for black people. So the 1619 Project.
Jonathan Kay :it's this editorial slash, quasi-academic project which was spearheaded by the New York Times, and they partnered with this now prominent I guess she was prominent before black historian and educator and writer who wrote about how the true founding of America took place in 1619, with bringing slaves, the bringing slaves to America, and how America was built on slavery. And again, very, very strong green of truth. But that New York times editorial project was marred by historical errors that historians actually pointed out, as the New York times was going to press with it, but they ignored it and that hurt, to my mind, hurt the cause of, of promoting social justice for black people, because it's. You don't have, excuse me, you don't have to resort to historical distortion to make the case that black people in the United States have been victimized by horrible, horrible injustices. In the same way, you don't have to distort the historical record to show that indigenous people in Canada have been targeted with all sorts of horrible injustices.
Jonathan Kay :But in people's zeal to make that case, they, at least in the case of these unmarked graves, as they've been described, have said and argued things that are counterfactual and it shouldn't be seen as quote-unquote denialism to point that out. This is one thing that bothers me is that you know you can say everything I've said and say you know, like there's been all these historical crimes but they've never actually found these 215 graves that supposedly exist. And there's like there's this guy named sean metcalf at uh, I think he's university of manitoba. He's this white guy who's like he's always on twitter calling anybody a denialist if they, if they, point this out. I'm like dude, like you know, if you say that 20 million people died in the holocaust, that's just wrong. It doesn't make you a denialist. You know facts like hey, sorry, six million people died in the Holocaust, it wasn't 20 million. And just because those horrible, horrible things happen doesn't mean any hyperbolic claim made in regard to that historical episode is a morally abhorrent thing to say.
Jonathan Kay :you're just stating facts, right 100 and you do point out that 3200 indigenous children have perished at least consequence of going to that school and 3200 was the figure that was contained in the the report, but even in that report it was pointed out that the the real figure is probably like maybe 5,000, 6,000, 7,000.
Jonathan Kay :They don't know, but 3,200 is the established baseline of what they know and, as the authors of that report pointed out, the figure is likely maybe perhaps several times that. And I acknowledge that whenever I write about the subject, because if you don't acknowledge it and you just fall back on like oh man, here they are complaining again, we give them all this money. That's not a productive way to have the conversation right, because it makes it sound like you just want to be done with the issue. But again, it's like if you break something you have to help fix it and it's absolutely like. I don't think anybody can disagree with the idea that when white people came to North America like they broke many indigenous societies in a way that they have a moral responsibility to help give them the tools to build themselves back up.
Aaron Pete:Exactly so. I had Candice Malcolm on and we talked about her career and her background. One of the areas that I focused on with her because she's the head for True North Centre, the one who helped publish the book is we get into this topic and I think we had a very good faith back and forth about the issue, but I could tell that she does lack sympathy for these people. Her focus was very much on hey, you know what? Let's not spend money on actually doing the research and doing like further investigations on this land. Let's just put that towards doing some puff pieces on some good Indigenous people and kind of making them role models for other Indigenous people and focusing on that. And yeah, some people may have had terrible experiences at residential school, but lots of people had good experiences. So let's just say that it was kind of middle-grounded and tough to say and let's move on from that and stop pouring money in. And so we did go back and forth and I again I credit the fact that I agree with you and her and the book that this needs further investigation and that the story I had Michael Moses on, who is a city councillor for Williams Lake.
Aaron Pete:He's now running for provincial politics in BC and he owns the fact that it's an extraordinary story and the facts just ain't there yet.
Aaron Pete:And he's First Nations I'm First Nations like we're not on the other side.
Aaron Pete:My big fear is that if we fight this book, if we say you're a denialist, if you even talk about these issues, that we're going to send people over to the other side so far that we can't have the conversation. And so I'm pleased to see Michael Moses saying, hey, this is a complicated story and we need to do further investigations. We both read the book prior to our discussion where we said, yes, there were pieces in there that were just kind of rhetoric that's just terrible, but there are pieces in here that are true, and one of your pieces is in there about these issues and kind of like grappling with them. So I'm to be honest, I'm glad to see that your writing is in there, because I think this book needed factual information and some people are going to jump on the other sections of the book and like that more, but I think we do facts and and you provided that- well, thank you, but you're, you're more educated than I am because you actually read the whole book which I confess you know.
Jonathan Kay :Um, I have I don't know if you can see behind me I have a whole row of books that I've written or contributed to, uh, but now the gig's up. People know that I haven't even read all of them. Um, it's like there's a famous basketball player, uh, basketball player who famously complained that he was misquoted in his own autobiography. He got a ghostwriter Charles Barkley was the name of that guy. So one problem here, like the same thing that I accuse progressives of, is conservatives do too, which is that you know, when I say like there's obviously this incredibly strong grain of truth to the idea that we need, like a more social justice oriented conversation around indigenous issues, and then progressives extrapolate that and say, like the whole conversation has to be about, like resistance and reconciliation, and like we don't have time for any of facts that are inconvenient. But you also see that in like conservatives who backlash against it and are like, oh, I'm so sick of this, like victimology, and so we're going to write a book or we're going to do a TV show which is all about, like, the amazing things that happen at residential schools. I'm like that's not a good idea because it's absolutely true and I've met people. I've talked about it already. There are indigenous people who I went to. Um, there are, you know, there's a famous artist who, who's written about it. Um, the good things that residential schools.
Jonathan Kay :But I tell people, every time you write a book or an article, it's a political aspect to it and you have to meet people where they are. And if you're a conservative and you come and you're writing an article and your first sentence is, let's talk about the amazing things that happen at residential schools, you're not going to convince anybody. It's just people are going to look, people including me, are going to look at it and say, really, that's your opening bid. And then you talk to some of these people and like I don't want to say all these people are racist, but I'm like I use that line. I say every time you pick up a pen it's an act of politics, even if you don't consider yourself a politician. And when you open your essay with just talking about like oh, I met this Indigenous guy and said, like going to residential school was awesome. How come no one talks about that? Like I'm not saying that's not true. But I'm saying if that's the first thing you tell people, they're going to make assumptions about who you are and what facts you're ignoring, and like it's just, it's not useful.
Jonathan Kay :You have to meet people where they are and where Canadians are right now. Is that not just progressives, not just like social justice fans or like the woke? Your average Canadian is now educated about a lot of the bad things that white people have done to Indigenous people, including in some cases forcing them to go to residential schools. And if you conduct the conversation in a way that's ignorant of that, no one is going to pay any attention to you. Like worst case scenario, they're going to call you a bigot, and they're you know. They're going to make you resign from your mayor's job because your wife said some crap. But like the best case scenario is you're just not going to have any influence on the public conversation. And so thank you for reading my my contributions to this book, which, again, were originally published in Quillette.
Jonathan Kay :But like I tried in those pieces to assure people, it's like I'm not coming into this conversation as like some guy from a capitalist think tank who, like all he wants to do is convince people to stop giving money to indigenous groups. It's actually the opposite of what I'm arguing, like, as I said, if, to the extent, money is useful in solving these issues, like let's spend more money um, I'd rather spend more money and preserve the historical integrity of our conversation. Um, then spend less money and just like give lip service to things that aren't true because they're rhetorically useful. But unfortunately, it's the opposite. Rhetoric is free and services and public assistance cost money. So for a lot of governments, justin Trudeau would rather get down on one knee in front of a camera than maybe make some of the investments in things like drinking water quality, which costs money, like land acknowledgements. Don't give people good drinking water, right, yeah, one down and one knee. Doesn't like.
Jonathan Kay :So this is the same problem with sweet corporations. Like corporations will pay minimum wage to their employees, but then go on and on on Twitter about like how much they love black lives matter. Love Black Lives Matter. And we made all our people wear pronoun pins and we're doing all this stuff which doesn't cost any money, but meanwhile our employees can't pay the rent because we pay them garbage wages. And this same pattern is going on with Indigenous stuff, where real problems get ignored. But instead, in a couple of days, I guarantee you, mark Miller is gonna be on Twitter, spent today thinking about the 215 lost children because that doesn't cost anything. Right, it burnishes his bona fides without actually costing a cent. Tweeting is free. That's the world we live in.
Aaron Pete:I find that you have very thoughtful perspectives that I think are really important. Can you tell people about the Quillette podcast, about your channel and how people can follow your work?
Jonathan Kay :Okay, first of all, the idea that I'm thoughtful is not a universally held opinion and as 30 seconds on social media will indicate, right. So I work at Quillette. Sometimes people say what's Quillette? And I say it's a made-up word, that my brilliant boss, claire Lehman, I think actually there is some obscure French word that exists, but it's like Gillette, you know, the best a man can get, but with Q-U instead of Z. So Quillettecom, that's where I write, that's where I edit, and the Quillette podcast. I share the hosting duties with my colleague Quillette, managing Editor. Her name is Iona and Iona Italia, and you can find that at Quillettecom and you can find me on social media being snarky at John Kay, j-o-n-k-a-y.
Jonathan Kay :I actually one of the reasons I love doing this is because having conversations with people like you is because a lot of people, even in my own neighborhood, know me from Twitter and my Twitter persona is kind of like a cartoon character. It's just like this. He's just like always wisecracking and, you know, provoking and you know, um, having a good time. It's like performance art. Right, I'm kind of um, but like, twitter is not the place for a conversation like the one we're having. Um, twitter is the place to like sick put-downs of the people I don't like. So yeah, if you just know me from Twitter, I'm proud of some of my long-form articles and thank you for reading the ones in Quillette and in this book. And thank you for reading that book because it sounds like you found the book to be a mixed bag. But I still don't think it's worth a mayor having to resign because his wife likes the book. Did he ever resign Like what happened with that story?
Aaron Pete:It's still going on, and it's not just that she recommended it in her book club, it's that he was posting about how there's some very important information in there and that there's a lot to learn. And so actually one of the reasons that Michael Moses ran in city politics within the Williams Lake was because they asked for an apology from the mayor in Williams Lake for kind of pushing this book and saying how great it was and how people should read it and there's lots to learn from it and not consulting First Nations. And so they went in. This person was a longstanding leader and he said I'm not going to apologize for this, and so I actually pushed Michael on the idea that are we not allowed to be wrong about things?
Aaron Pete:You have to hold these kind of perspectives in order to sit in office. That's a dangerous path. We might not agree on how much we should put into health care. We might not agree, and that's just not a politically charged issue. And so when we start to make it, I think more books like like grave error will come about, because then we're picking sides are you pro-indigenous all the way? Are you anti-indigenous all the way? And then we kind of get stuck in this and then people get jaded because maybe that mayor was doing a great job in their community, maybe they were solving the sewage issues and the water issues, like that. Municipal politics politics doesn't need to be about grand federal issues of the history of canada and stuff. Like usually, for the most part, you're building sidewalks and lights and like maybe we should just keep that to that kind of world and not judge people based on like maybe we disagree on some of these important topics.
Jonathan Kay :I think I mean, if I were a municipal politician, I wouldn't. The last thing I would be talking about is indigenous stuff and and Gaza. Like we haven't talked about Gaza, which is probably a good thing, but everyone else talked about it. But like you know all these things, like my local library putting out a statement about Gaza, like who cares what you think about Gaza? You know it's like who cares what you know local comedy troupe thinks about Gaza. I think, to a certain extent, one of the problems we have is that local actors within our society all feel like they have to have an opinion about you know, whether it's indigenous issues or Gaza, or Ukraine, or Donald Trump. I don't like Donald Trump, but I don't like being lectured about Donald Trump by, like my local politician. Like how you know I elected you to pave the roads, like, focus on that, don't lecture me about foreign politics, right? So anyway, thanks for educating me about that. My't lecture me about foreign politics. Anyway, thanks for educating me about that.
Aaron Pete:My pleasure. I really appreciate this conversation. As I said, I appreciate you as an intellectual because I think you make this digestible and you actually care about understanding the issue and not just giving the rhetoric, which is why I wanted to speak with you to get into some of these topics further. So thank you again.
Jonathan Kay :All right, well, I look forward to seeing you. Hopefully, next trip to BC I'll make it out to Chilliwack, fantastic. Okay, take care.
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