Mark Milke introduces his new book: Why Canada Should be Cherished, not Canceled

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This is just an excerpt from The Ezra Levant Show. To see new, ad-free episodes, which air Monday - Friday @ 8 p.m. ET | 6 p.m. MT, become a subscriber to RebelNews+. This episode originally aired on June 20, 2023.

On last night’s episode of The Ezra Levant Show, Ezra was joined by Mark Milke, founder and president of the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy, to explain his latest book: The 1867 Project: Why Canada Should Be Cherished - Not Cancelled.

Ezra asked him for some background on the Aristotle Foundation, “What’s your mission?”

Well, our mission is to champion reason, democracy and civilization or civil society, as people might know it. Now, you're right, it sounds very kind of highfalutin. But basically, we want to make people think. Because I think a lot of people or some people anyway, in the chattering classes, and it filters down, are not thinking these days.

The two also discussed Mark’s book, which is a group of essays written by twenty different authors. Mark explained one of the essays standing against the “hurricane of woke”:

You mentioned Matthew Lau was in the 1867 project. And his chapter is key because there is this notion that Canada is systemically racist today. What Matthew does is he adds some history and some statistics to this claim and then rebuts the claim. So how he does that he says look, yeah, 70 years ago, 100 years ago, there was discrimination against minorities in this country, but today, if you look at the income stats, you look at ethnicity, you look at income, well, who's at the top of the heap income-wise? It's, those with East Asian origins. For example, himself and the Chinese community, if you look at Japanese Canadians, if you look at someone from Taiwan as opposed to China proper, but, generally East Asian Canadians are at the top of the income heap, which is a good thing. Now, it doesn't mean there are no individual bigots out there or prejudice. And Matthew makes this distinction in the 1867 project. But to find a bigot out there is not the same thing as saying Canada is systemically racist, you know, and people are not clear in this, and that's the problem these days. People don't make distinctions, they don't actually define what they mean when they talk.

Ezra mentioned how one of the essays, written by Greg Piasetzki, is about the wooden coffin built around the statue of Canada’s first prime minister John A. MacDonald, in the heart of Toronto. Mark explained why the essay’s author said that the city was wrong to treat the statue this way:

Well, because he [John A, MacDonald] favoured treaties and carried out treaties in the West specifically to make sure that what happened in the American West didn't happen in the Canadian West, founded the Northwest mounted police to protect the first settlers, you could say from later settlers and vice versa, but first settlers from later settlers, and he provided famine relief. Plus, he was instrumental as part of the effort to inoculate indigenous Canadians against smallpox. So for all those reasons and more, Greg details why John A. MacDonald, as he puts it, saved more indigenous lives than any other prime minister.