 What do Canadians think about what's going on in the U.S.? This is Think Tech. We're talking to a Canuck in western Canada, like the Ken Rogers, a retired businessman there. Welcome to the show, Ken. Well, you can at least say it right. It's a Canuck. Canuck. How silly of me. Thank you. Thank you. I stand corrected on that. We have many tens of millions, not as many as in the United States of Canucks across the border. And they get the same TV. They can see the same newspaper, the same websites. And they look at the United States through the perspective of being Canadians, which is different because Canadians are nicer people. Am I right? Well, I think so. But I know a lot of extremely nice Americans. It's just that you seem to have a large percentage of not-so-nice Americans. Well, you look and you see the divisiveness we have. You see the dysfunctionality in Congress and the Supreme Court. You see violence in the streets. You see all these immigration problems, economic problems. I mean, we seem to have it all lately in an article in The Times yesterday about how we were leaderless, that no strong leader is correcting any of this. But that's just my view and maybe the view of some of the media in the United States. I just wondered where Canadians stand. And I have to add that you had this truck strike in Toronto not too long ago, which seemed to reflect the same kind of divisiveness. However, I would mention that the news later reported that the truck strike was organized in the United States and the Canadian truckers had been manipulated. But anyway, what's your thought? You see the newspapers. You've seen television. I'm sure you think about us. What's your impression? Well, most of my life Canadians have thought of Americans as reasonably equal. And many, many years envied the United States, where today it's really one of feeling sorry for the Americans or we're having pity for them. Really, because you got this mixture of things that make the US less attractive than we see Canada as being where usually the United States would lead the world in many things that one would call good for the citizens and good for the world. Well, you really have a mixture of things that kind of spoil that image. The endless amount of guns and the whole attitude towards guns. Secondly, you've got the method by which your major politicians get elected, like the humongous amount of money that's required and the way it's funded. You really end up with these very, very rich, biased, wealthy people who want to have less tax and less government regulation of their desire to make more millions of dollars that just makes it so your politicians aren't working in the public good. They're working for the rich elite and your healthcare system is really broken for at least the bottom two-thirds of your population in the sense that a major cause of bankruptcy in the United States has to do with healthcare. In Canada, nobody goes bankrupt for any health problem. The most important subject for any politician in Canada really is the healthcare and how the public insists that it be kept and kept in as good a shape as can be. It's not, ours isn't perfect, but it's sure better than the American one. So you really have a variety of things that combine to let's say make us feel sorry for the Americans, but the attack on the Capitol really kind of underlined that. I want to focus on that today. We'll drill down on many of the issues you've touched on, but today let's talk about the insurrection. Let's talk about the congressional investigation. Well firstly, from the press that we see, a lot of it's the same as yours, there's a ton of Americans, mainly in the Republican Party or Republican followers, that don't even want to call it an insurrection. They're just a bunch of nice tourists going on a tour of the Capitol building. Well that certainly isn't what you saw on TV. I don't know, you know, what kind of drugs they're taking to come to that conclusion, but certainly it's totally illogical. But I think the hearings are a pretty superb bit of effort to, let's say, get the facts out there. You know, the average educated Canadian would wonder why the heck Donald Trump hasn't been in jail already. And a bunch of the key players like the, I think there was a guy named Miller who was the one that was in charge of deciding what the D.C. National Guard would do. You know, and apparently, you know, from what we've seen up here is that he had orders from Trump a week or so before the January 6th, that not to have the National Guard disrupt his wonderful followers. And, you know, the key reason that the attack on the Capitol building was almost a success and was in fact as atrocious as it really ended up being and as close to getting people like Pence in, you know, hung from the gallows they had outside, you know, is that, you know, other jurisdictions sent their support rather than the D.C. National Guard, you know, should have been the backup. You know, it all, you know, just wondering, there was a time, wasn't there, Ken, when you would have made the comparison between Canada and the U.S. without pity? In other words, you would find, okay, we're similar. Heck, it's more than that. It was even, you could look at the U.S. with envy in many regards. Yeah. I mean, that would be economic, it would be governmental, it would be economic is always a really major factor. And that that's the one where the United States still has a pretty wonderful standard living compared to most countries, you know, you're no longer the best by far, but certainly you're in the top 10. And I imagine that when you looked south, you felt some confidence in the American legal system. Is it fair to say that? Some confidence in the government, some confidence in Congress and the Supreme Court and, you know, all the executive branch departments and so forth. What was it like, say, before, before, you know, we've had these troubles? Well, there was confidence. I mean, everybody always wondered why you had some quirks in your system. You know, as I call them quirks, example, the whole thing about the electoral college. You know, it seems like a weird contortion. It does no purpose whatsoever. And obviously, you know, the recent events show that all it all it all it accomplishes, it creates a vulnerability to the peaceful transfer. You know, indeed. So now, talking about the committee hearings, you know, there's been a lot of discussion about maybe we should not prosecute Trump, even though we seem to have a lot of at least circumstantial evidence that that would convict him, because it would be disruptive to the country and that a presidential leader should be left alone so we can move on and try to forget what happened. What's the Canadian, you know, generally speaking, what's the view of the Canadian people about that? The guy committed the most heinous crimes, lock them up and throw away the key. You don't think that people don't think that would be disruptive to the government, that we would be, you know, involved in a kind of distraction from solving other problems? Let's use a slightly Canadian slap. You know, the excuse that Putin used to go into Ukraine. Now, Ukraine has about the same population as Canada. You know, Canadians would think after what we've seen of Trump, what would prevent him from saying, gee, the world could use some potash and extra oil and gas and a whole bunch of these precious minerals? Why don't we just take Saskatchewan and Alberta? Those are, you know, two provinces that hold a ton of the kind of resources the world is short of right now. You know, it's just, he's just untrustworthy. He's just not, you know, how anybody could put him in charge of anything or let him out on any kind of leash. It's just hard to believe that, you know, and I don't think that, you know, letting Nixon off the hook was the right decision back then either. Suppose you were on a jury and you had the information that we have seen come out on television, you know, in these congressional investigation hearings. Do you think you would have enough to, in your mind, convict Trump? Yes, yes, you don't even need to go further. I think that that looks so obvious from, from a Canadian point of view, that just wonder how come it's taken so long? You know, your comment about, you know, convicting a former president might be, you know, disruptive in many regards, but I think it would be more disruptive not to enforce the rule of law and say that nobody's above the law and in particular, anybody in position, anybody in authority. I mean, I would think that most Canadians would believe that a huge number of these Republican senators and congressional people like the Josh Collies and, and, oh, there's a whole bunch of them that, you know, they're, they're, they took an oath and they have blatantly broken that oath. They should, you know, there should be a method by which you just turf them out. I mean, in the Canadian politics, they have, you know, standard of conduct rules and, you know, they sanction members and, and like the British parliament, you know, it was the parliamentarians that kicked out Boris Johnson. Now, finally, there was lots of public pressure, you know, but, you know, they were just embarrassed. Well, Boris Johnson didn't do anything as disgraceful as Trump. And I'm sure it's true. So if that, you know, I wanted to ask you that. That's my unbiased opinion, of course. Well, but your unbiased opinion is that of a Canadian who talks to a lot of people who has a lot of connection with, you know, the Canadian sensibilities on these things. And I find it interesting you talk about Josh Hawley and he's not the only one where, again, there's direct and circumstantial, circumstantial evidence linking him with the effort to overthrow the election. And in my view, that means overthrow the government, you know, to overthrow the peaceful transition of power is to overthrow the government, which, which is pretty serious business when you overthrow the government, when it got left chaos. So is this, is this something that would be completely intolerable in Canada? I mean, if somebody raised his head like Josh Hawley, somebody did the kinds of things that Trump is, you know, being shown to have done to overthrow the government. What do you think would happen de facto in Canada if that were shown? You'd have mixed reactions. I mean, but generally you'd have, you know, tar and feather him and run him out of town. Yeah. I mean, it's pretty disgraceful behavior, like the, the key to the whole insurrection to me came down to the big lie. And then you end up where you have people who in their prior life, you know, spoke truths and seemed pretty sensible. You know, but you even had guys like Mitt Romney shy away from saying, this is terrible, you know, and standing there out of the fear of, of, you know, the wrath of some Republican something or other from up high, you know, it just seems really, you know, un-American that you'd have these people in high places, violating their oaths for some idiot at the top. I mean, my phrase calling Trump an idiot, I don't know how you could describe them as, you know, anything that's totally sane. Yeah. So, you know, you mentioned that there's a certain amount of divisiveness in Canada where some people wouldn't call him an idiot. Some people would support him. I guess, what are you saying in terms of that divisiveness? Well, well, if you take the, the convoy that went to Ottawa, you said Toronto, but it really was Ottawa. And, and it shows a big difference between Canada and the US. You know, the truckers stuck those big convoys in locations where they totally disrupted the economic activity in Ottawa. But nobody was walking around with guns. Nobody was threatening anybody else. You had some politicians saying, you know, they sympathize with the truckers' cause. You know, well, you know, in the news, did you ever hear, you know, I don't know, in America, if you heard, what, what were they, what were their grievances? You know, did you hear about any grievances? I'm sure I did at the time, but now you ask me, I, I do not remember there was any one single grievance that stood out. No, they just, you know, were annoyed that COVID had continued and they thought the mask mandates was lasting a bit too long. And, you know, and some of them mumbled about not wanting to be vaccinated, but most Canadians thought that was weird. Like, like our percentage of people that are vaccinated is, you know, really high, like the province I live in, it's got to be like 95% of anybody over the age of 12 has had more than two shots. That goes, that goes then that the whole Ottawa thing goes to the question of politicizing issues which should not be politicized, issues which, you know, which, which, which clearly should be resolved in favor of helping, helping people. And now we have this incident, and there's this proper thing in Ottawa. Thank you for correcting me on that, which was, I believe generated in the United States over COVID, just masks and vaccines, which is really totally absurd because those things should not be politicized at all. They are to help you. How did that happen? How did those things which, you know, most Canadians, as you say, would be happy to help them, you know, help the larger group of people stay healthy? How did it get politicized? Well, first, I'd like to correct you that it wasn't totally originated in the U.S., you know, it certainly was a big push and a big help and a bunch of financing, and a bunch of the participants were clearly American and American pushed. But, you know, there were lots of Canadian truckers on their own that not only went to Ottawa, they went to a whole bunch of border crossings like there was a border crossing between the province of Alberta and Montana, which is really an important corridor for the, for trade. And there was a, the bridge between Southern Ontario and Detroit, and there were truckers separately from the ones that went to Ottawa that went and stuck their 18-wheelers in the way to purely disrupt all of the flow of international trade. But anyhow, the, the cause that's shooting yourself in the foot also, isn't it? The international trade benefits both parties to the trading. Why would anyone do that? And why would anybody join the insurrection at your capital building? I mean, you know, some of those people, like, you know, think of the, the fellow that went in the capital with those big horns on, you know, with, painted up like he was in a, you know, Cherokee warrior or something. You know, you wouldn't call that a normal person, like, normal common sense. Now what, what somebody sense of values is, you know, people vary a lot. And, and I know lots of people that, that agree with some of the, the rioters and, and the extreme view that, you know, North America or let's call it the United States and Canada, you know, should be just all white people and we should, you know, have, you know, white supremacy type of thing. That, you know, really is not a mainstream, but you've got enough individual people that have their unique grievance. And if you can stir up somebody with religious grievance and combine him with somebody who doesn't like wearing a mask and combine him with somebody who, who heard nothing except Donald Trump say that election was stolen, you know, you can assemble a whole bunch of people, even though they all have different causes, they can all be, you know, angry and riotous. You know, it's interesting because we've been examining why Trump has the base here, why Trump has people, so many people who believe that he won that election and why so many people won't watch Fox News crowd, won't even watch the insurrection hearings and disregard, you know, all the evidence that is coming in. And so, you know, I think one thing I would like to ask you is I don't understand the connection, why any Canadian, you know, would feel that way. What in the world would politicize Canadian points of view about what's happening in the U.S.? It's very, very small, but you have, you know, what I would call some of the far right-wing philosophies is what they support rather than Trump the person. You have, like, Trump's base, you know, one of the ones is white supremacy, you know, if we keep allowing enough immigration, eventually the whites will be diluted and no longer be in charge of what used to be their country. You know, that narrow-minded attitude, you know, there are some Canadians that think that same thing. Similarly, there are business people who don't like regulations. You have, and so Trump, you know, chopping the department of environment, you know, well, if you were an executive or somebody whose affairs, financial affairs were disrupted because a pipeline was not approved across your land and you didn't make a big pile of money because, you know, the regulations prevented it, you might be so angry about government regulations that you again, for that one reason only, are, you know, thinking Trump and the things that he stood for are good. You know, you've got similarly, you know, a bunch of the religious stuff, you know, is like what seems funny is you have, you know, a huge evangelical religious following behind the Trump bunch and yet, you know, for the one single cause, you know, abortion, they will stand there and back him to the hilt even in the face of, you know, him throwing children in jail or in cages in the Mexican border. You know, so you get for single causes, individuals will back a leader, you know, who supports that cause relative to other leaders and they, you know, their one single cause will their mind outweigh everything else, so they will simply stand in there, you know, like a rabid dog in favor of that candidate despite the fact. Yeah, you're right. It's catching like a virus. You support one cause and you support a candidate with that cause and then you wind up supporting everything the candidate wants from you. Well, you know, he got his power that way. Yeah, you don't necessarily favor all of the other things like I certainly don't think a bunch of these evangelical people thought that putting kids in the cages at the US border was a wonderful idea and supported that, but they were so in favor of his attitude towards abortion that they turned a blind eye to that minor indiscretion as opposed to common sense would say it's not a minor problem. Well, you know, one last thing, you know, so we will drill down in this show on looking, you know, the view from the north in Canada on various issues, some of which you've touched on today, others of which will emerge as we go forward because we get more news now and more outrage now than we did before, but I want to ask you one last question about the insurrection and about the congressional hearings looking into it and for that matter, you know, Merrick Garland's potential investigation or investigation such as it is, as we learned yesterday. My question is this, is that the group of people in Canada who support Trump on these things, who believe the insurrection was just a walk in the park and that the investigation in Congress is not meaningful for them, this group of people in Canada for whatever reason, do they have any political influence? Do they influence the government or anyone in the government? Do they influence legislators, for example, to take positions consistent with their view and that would be the Trump view? Or are they completely laughed out of town? Oh, they're just laughed out of town. You know, they're, you know, when I've got a friend, very close friend, who one of his kids is exactly in that category and it's an embarrassment to the parents and they aren't shy about talking about it. You know, it's that embarrassing or it's deemed to be that out of line and that unique. But before you leave the thing on the hearing, you know, I had two comments that I had meant to add. One is, you know, the real star of the hearings has been Liz Cheney. She has looked good and that highlights really the most important thought from Canada is we pray that Americans will get their act together. And in particular, we sure wish the Republican Party would be able to get out of the Trump influence. Like they've lost their way. They don't seem to have any leader or any push to get out of that hole. You know, you can hear from things from time to time, Mitch McConnell, you know, whom I don't particularly like, but I certainly think that, you know, he was blunt about Trump's, the guy who brought, you know, got the crowd to move there and he's totally to blame and he ought to pay for it, you know, and that's up to the courts, you know, sort of thing. But, you know, it's really that the shame is that the Republican Party does not exist like it ought to. It's really a negative force right now. And that's really everything Canada has angst about relates to the absence of having that second party, you know, whether you're a small C conservative or a small L liberal, it doesn't matter. You like to see a balance and you like to see both sides play a role. Angst, you mentioned angst, and that's my, I'm really curious as to what you mean. The Canadians and Canada in general is concerned about what's happening in this country. How, how do they, assuming they feel angst, what do they feel angst about? What could happen to Canada as a result of, you know, this insurrection, the failure of the American experiment? Well, probably be a mess because economically, you know, Canada and the U.S. are very, you know, intertwined, but you've got to put that in perspective. Canada, you know, is large geographically, but, you know, we have less population than California. You know, so, so really, you know, California is quite different than much of the rest of the U.S., you know, and so is Canada, but, but certainly if you cut off everything that runs between California and the rest of the U.S., what kind of mess would you have? You know, well, that's the kind of mess we would have, but we're as closely connected to the U.S. as if Canada were in, you know, the 51st state or we have 10 provinces and, you know, probably, you know, seven of the 10 are as close to the U.S. as any state, so that, but also, you know, one would have a militarily, or at least, you know, the sovereignty concern is certainly no Canadian would trust Trump any more than they would trust Putin as our next door neighbor. That's a good real blunt way to describe it. Yeah. Well, we're out of time now, Ken, but we'll be back in a couple of weeks. We'll drill down on any number of issues to make the comparison in terms of the way these two countries operate and what they think of each other. Thank you so much for joining us today. All right. Thanks, Jay, and have a good day. Aloha. Thank you so much for joining us today, and don't forget to subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at thinktecawaii.com. Mahalo.