016 – Transcript

Just Right Episode 016

Air Date: August 2, 2007

Host: Bob Metz

Station Disclaimer
The views expressed in this program are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the views of 94.9 CHRW.

Clip (My Favorite Martian)

Female Character: Are these the equations on which you base your theory, Professor?

Professor: Mm-hmm. You see what I mean? To me, that’s the most fascinating thing in the world. You’ll probably think it’s very dull.

Female Character: On the contrary, I find it very interesting.

Uncle Martin: Very interesting. He’s being nice to me, isn’t he?

Female Character: Well, you don’t have to wade through that stuff just to make me feel good.

Uncle Martin: I really do want to read it.

Tim: Well, I just want to second, Uncle Martin. He is wrong about Mars.

Uncle Martin: Now, you tell me what is so brilliant about being wrong.

Tim: Sometimes we have to be wrong before we can be right. It was because Columbus was wrong that he discovered this continent. He thought he was sailing to India.

Uncle Martin: If you’re going to call Jennings a fraud, you’ve got to call Columbus a fraud, too.

Tim: I refuse to break the spirit of a scientific genius just to pamper my own personal vanity.

Female Character: Well, there goes my exclusive.

Well, that’s the way the planet plummets.

Bob Metz: Good morning, London. It is Thursday, August 2nd. I’m Bob Metz, and this is Just Right on CHRW 94.9 FM, where we will be with you from now until noon.

No, no, not right wing. Just right.

Welcome to the show this morning on a very hot August the 2nd. I hear the humidex is supposed to go up into the mid-40s today, with the actual temperature being in the mid-30s. So we’re talking global meltdown today, folks. This is global warming. This is what it’s going to feel like all the time.

Welcome to the show. A lot of topics today. It’s going to be a bit of an odd show. I had so many subjects that have built up over the past few months that I never got to, that I’m sort of playing catch-up with today. And among them will be a little more follow-up on basically things we’ve done before, but some follow-ups on them and what’s happened since my previous commentaries, including global warming and things that were said about marijuana smoking, photo radar, and speed limits. And if we get to them, we’ll talk a little bit about World War III and the monarchy again, which I saw come up in some of the media based on some of the things that I was talking about earlier in the show.

But first of all, the number you want to call if you want to get through and discuss any of these issues or any other issues on your mind that we’ve discussed on the show is 519-661-3600.

And the phone will be answered by Ira Timothy, our producer and operator, and he’ll talk to you there and get you on. We also have something new. I mentioned it very briefly last week, a new way of getting ahold of us, and that is, of course, through email.

And the email address is justrightchrw@gmail.com. So if you want to get ahold of us, you can comment on anything. You can comment on any show or topic, whether it’s the current one or one you heard in the past.

You can suggest topics, ask questions, offer praise, offer criticism. I can’t promise to deal with every email individually. I can only promise that all of them will be read. And because of the nature of the show being weekly, we can’t do everything all the time. We will eventually get to them. I’ll pick a show and I’ll pick the emails that I think hit some of the points that perhaps require responses and deal with them as we go.

It’s interesting. I’ve been doing this now for, oh, we’re going into our fourth month now.

This is, we actually finished our first quarter year, which is amazing. This is sort of a thing I never thought I would do. I’m certainly not a DJ, never planned to be one as such. When I was offered this opportunity back in April, I didn’t really know how the show would shape out, how it was going to evolve. It was sort of like being tossed into a pool and learning how to swim or sink as you go.

Right, Ira? That’s what it’s like live radio. That’s another interesting thing about live radio is you don’t get a chance to rehearse or do take two or anything like that. And of course you have to be sort of ready on time every time.

And that sort of put a crimp in my lifestyle for the last little while until I got organized enough. And as I see the show shaping up, it’s partially the direction that I want to push things in and, of course, limited by the format of the show, the timing of the show, the theme of the show.

When I started this back in April, we had just finished doing here on CHRW. I’d been a guest regularly on Jim Chapman’s Left, Right, and Center.

And it was very soon after that that I started doing this show on April 19, and I called it Just Right, which has more meaning to it than you might think on the surface, but it certainly was a natural evolution from having been identified as the right component on Jim Chapman’s show Left, Right, and Center, which aired for many years, about 10 years, both on CJBK and here on CHRW.

Interesting, though, isn’t it? You ever think about it? There’s no center wing. There’s just a left wing and a right wing in politics, but no center wing.

There is in hockey, but not in politics.

Now, also, the theme of not right wing, just right, that I open the show up with all the time. I have already, in the past, given sort of two primers on what I think the difference is between left wing and right wing. Not going to do that today, but we’ll do it again probably in September when I intend to go and deal with a lot of other issues such as political definitions, the words we use every day to define our environment.

That kind is a little bit what I want to talk about right now, sort of what to expect from the show and how the show will shape up.

For me, knowing what is right is not about knowing what is right, but rather by knowing how one discovers what is right. It is a process and not an end. Being right is not about staking out a position and holding it at any cost. I’ve changed my mind many times over issues, particularly when facts and circumstances illustrate to me that what I believed before was not the way things actually worked.

So, what I decided to do with the show, of course, we’ve always been commenting on political issues in the past, and it’s something I’ve done quite a bit. This isn’t the only show where I get to voice my opinions in a broadcast market. I’ve done hundreds of radio shows and television shows all around the province. Just last week I was on the CTS network on a show called On the Line that’s hosted by Christine Williams. I’m pretty much a regular there.

I go at least once every three or four weeks. And that’s the same network that, of course, Michael Coren is on. Michael has me on the show every now and then, but much less frequently than Christine does. And I get to talk about very much the same things we talk about here and that we talked about on Left, Right and Center.

In fact, that show that they do on CTS, the last time I was on, it was aired here in London on this past Monday, I think. But it’s very much the format of the old Left, Right and Center. There’s three people on the show and we talk about issues as they’re presented to us through newspaper articles and things like that, which is a little bit about what this show, Just Right, is sort of evolving into.

It’s certainly a show with a common theme of freedom.

It’s certainly the thing that I’m into. That’s why I talk. That’s why I’m in the public eye in any case. People know I’m involved with the Freedom Party of Ontario.

Not only involved with, but I’m one of the founding members. And for a show like this, I thought I should really incorporate issues of philosophy, politics, entertainment, art, culture, news, and editorial opinion, generally all relating to public forums in which ideas are presented and debated and defended and critiqued.

For me, when I look at the whole radio scene and the whole media scene, I think there’s a great need out there. What I’m trying to do here a bit, apart from a little bit of self-indulgence, I guess, if you want to call it that.

But for me, the show is about filling a philosophical need in a social necessity. I learned very slowly. I was almost 30 years old before I woke up to politics, even though I’d been voting up until then. And it struck me after being a candidate. I’ve been a candidate federally, municipally, and provincially.

Haven’t been recently, but I did in the 80s and 90s. And it struck me that a defense of individual freedom is basically a necessity. Very few people really understand it to its core. And most people in the political field aren’t worried about freedom. They’re worried about their personal interests and hoping they can use a political system to benefit them somehow.

But because freedom benefits everyone equally and no one in particular, it’s not on the agenda of most political parties, other than, of course, Freedom Party. But if you look at the way most political parties are, they really don’t put freedom first. They put benefits first, and you see it glaringly with every election. We see a federal election on the horizon. We see the provincial election.

And what are they doing? They’re promising to give us all kinds of money for all these government programs, which, of course, comes out of your pocket. Every promise that is made to you is a promise to tax you at the same rate. It’s funny, we wouldn’t allow used car salesmen to sell us a car without telling us the price, telling us the conditions. But that’s how we accept political products.

We go out there and we buy the product, and then we’re informed of the price years and years later.

I think, too, over time, with Just Right the show, you’ll find that there’s sort of a continuum. It’s almost a record. You can’t do anything today in broadcast or anything you do online. This show is also online, by the way. You can go to the website, chrwradio.com, and you’ll see all the shows that the station has here, and they are archived, and they’re kept up for a week. So you can listen to this show online for a week, which is another reason, by the way, that I think email would be another way for people to get a hold of us. A lot of people can’t listen at this particular hour because they work, they have other concerns, and many of them I know from those who contact me listen to the show over the internet when they download the show from chrwradio.com.

Of course, this is volunteer radio, just in case you’re wondering.

I don’t get paid for this. It’s a labor of love in a lot of ways. I think a lot of the people here are here for that reason on their shows. It is, of course, live. And another thing I should say about the show just generally is that it’s a weekly show.

It’s not daily. And due to that nature, the nature of that situation, and also due to my own nature, I don’t want Just Right to be an instant reaction to what happened five minutes ago kind of show. Because usually that’s when the most misinformation and speculation is just running rampant.

I clip newspapers and I clip them late, honestly, to tell you. So when I get to clip, say, four weeks worth of newspapers, and then you see what was a hot item on Monday is almost a non-issue by Wednesday, and then you realize you just get a different perspective of the news.

And so I think I’d like the show to be a little bit more about considered opinion making. I usually prepare the show here for Thursday on the Tuesday previous. That’s usually when I get a chance to do it. Sometimes I’m babysitting that day, and that’s a great time for me to also work on my notes, decide what I’m going to do, pick the clips that you hear on the show from time to time, which I think are from various television shows. I don’t know if you recognize the one that started today’s show.

That was a clip, believe it or not, from My Favorite Martian. Can you imagine that show? That was such a silly, stupid show in so many ways, but often they just hit right on critical morals, and it was a very good teaching show in that way.

And I think that’s one of the things that keeps shows like that popular.

I don’t read newspapers on a daily basis or sometimes not even on a timely basis. I recycle, literally. I get all my copies of the London Free Press, The National Post, The Economist, and almost any other publication I might refer to from time to time from other subscribers who give them to me when they’re through with them. I’ve been doing this for years.

Simply because I’m in no particular hurry because usually the hundreds of radio shows and talk shows that I’ve been on over the years is that I’ve learned that really no news is new news. Only the actors change, but the plays basically remain the same. I don’t even suggest changing the script. History repeats itself because everyone continues to read from the same script over and over again, and yet all progress was created by those individuals and very seldom groups who departed from the old script.

Real news is a very rare event.

So that’s basically, I don’t know how the show is going to shape up in the future. We have guests sometimes. Sometimes we do many subjects within a single show.

Sometimes we do a single subject. But once again, if you want to contact us, the email now is justrightchrw@gmail.com. And of course the open line number during the hour that we’re on live is 519-661-3600.

Now just before we go to this first little break, one little quick comment on something I just caught in the paper. Oh, this was yesterday. Talk about holy cow. I’m really up to date then. I just lied about everything I just said. I actually have yesterday’s article here from the front page.

I just couldn’t resist Tom Gosnell here, of course, who also appeared with me, by the way, many times on Left, Right, and Center on CHRW when he sat in for Jim Chapman, or sometimes was the guest himself. But he’s here again lashing out. It says, according to Joe Belanger’s story on the front page yesterday, complaining about whining, the whining socialist cabal in City Hall, who’s apparently keeping back development there.

And of course, it’s funny when you use a word like socialism or call somebody a socialist. The first reaction that the socialist gives you is that you’re name calling. Don’t call me that. If somebody called me a capitalist, I’d say thank you.

Aren’t they proud of what they believe in? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to be?

If you think socialism is good, you shouldn’t regard it as a bad word.

But without going into the details, there was just one paragraph here in the article that to me, I will take on face value, whether it’s accurate or not, but that’s all I can judge, and that’s part of being right and being wrong. You can’t always try to second guess yourself and worry about not having accurate information from time to time. You can have total confidence if you know how to arrive at a conclusion based on certain information, if you also have the willingness to amend your position when new information comes to your attention. And it doesn’t invalidate anything you may have said before, as long as you set up the parameters.

Here’s the statement from the paper. Council is divided into two camps on growth. One that says growth should be managed, and the other that says it should be market-driven.

Well, basically, if I’m going to take that as a definition, just raw, never mind the literal issues or what really might be going on in the background, that does mean that there is a socialist camp and a free market or capitalist camp, relatively speaking. The one that says growth should be managed has to be the socialist camp, because that’s what socialists believe in, quote, managing the marketplace, which means using laws and regulations and essentially the use of force in the marketplace, instead of allowing what we call market forces, which is really about choices and things of that nature.

So just on a basis of definition, I thought it was kind of funny if you’re a socialist and acting like one, don’t worry about the label. Roll with it.

That’s it for now. Now, just before, we’re heading right now into a brief little break, and coming up right now in this clip is also sort of an American view by Dr. Walter Williams on, it almost strikes a bit of what the theme of the show is about, how we lose our freedoms bit by bit. It’s a universal concept. A lot of the clips I use on the show here, by the way, are not just Canadian.

I’ve used British, and I’ve used American as well. I see that is all a common wealth. We all have a common culture in that sense and background. This is American, of course, and on the other side of this, we’ll get back to some other follow-ups on global warming and such.

But first, this message, and then on the other side of this, we’ll get into the second topic.

Clip (Dr. Walter Williams)
In the name of other ideals, such as equality of income, race and sex balance, orderly markets, consumer protection, energy conservation, environmentalism, just name a few, we have abandoned many personal freedoms. As a result of widespread control by government in order to achieve these so-called higher objectives, you and I have been subordinated to the point where considerations of personal freedom are but secondary and tertiary matters. That is, we have been subordinated to the point where the issues of personal freedom are treated as if they are dirt.

Let me give you an example of that because you might think I’m being too extreme with this. Suppose that as I own myself, I belong to Walter Williams, suppose I tell the politicians or suppose I tell Congress, I own myself, I am a free individual, and I will take care of my own retirement. I don’t want you to force me into your government retirement program.

Social Security. They will laugh in my face. They will treat that consideration of personal liberty as dirt.

Now the ultimate end, ladies and gentlemen, to this process is totalitarianism. Now keep in mind, I am not saying that we are a totalitarian nation yet, but if you ask the question, which way are we headed, tiny steps at a time? Are we headed towards more liberty or towards more totalitarianism?

The unambiguous answer would have to be towards more totalitarianism. And keep in mind that even if you take tiny steps towards some goal, sooner or later you are going to reach that goal. Or maybe it’s better described by an eminent philosopher named David Hume, and he said, it’s seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.

It’s always lost bit by bit.

Clip (Global Warming Discussion)

Speaker 1: The kids are worried. In the interview you won’t see, they told us global warming is melting Canada, and we could all die.

Speaker 2: These kids were fearful too. Floods will happen, and we won’t be able to breathe. And if we can’t breathe, we’ll probably go extinct.

Speaker 3: I think it’s tragic that someone has frightened these kids. But I keep hearing how global warming is causing bad weather.

We looked very closely at hurricanes, at tornadoes, at hail, at storminess. None of those things are increasing. They are not getting worse.

Speaker 4: Better to be safe than sorry.

Speaker 5: Maybe we are warming the atmosphere. At what cost are you sorry? A trillion dollars?

Speaker 6: Is a trillion dollars sorry enough?

Speaker 5: Well that works for me. A trillion dollars. Just about do it, don’t you think?

Should just be about right.

Bob Metz: Welcome back to the show 519-661-3600 if you want to call in, and justrightchrw@gmail.com if you’d like to email us.

I had no idea two weeks ago on July 19th when I actually covered Tom Harris and a debate he had in the Free Press with Elizabeth May. But I did my own commentary two weeks ago today, and I had no idea on that day that in fact the London Free Press was doing the same thing on the very two subjects that I had picked on that day. And honest to God folks, I hadn’t seen the Free Press yet. Like I tell you, most of the time I read the paper late. And I’m glad I didn’t see the paper that day because it probably would have really distracted me.

I was really disappointed by what I saw. And it gives you some idea of why I’m doing this and why I get so frustrated when I read the newspapers and the way people think about issues. This is not about the issue itself now.

This is more about how people think about it and how they arrive at their conclusions in this first case about global warming.

Now Tom Harris was my guest here on the show on Just Right back on May 17th. He’s one of the many people that works with what’s called the Natural Resources Stewardship Project. And basically they put out scientific papers and statements and things on global warming. And there’s a lot of people involved with the group.

He’s just one of many. But what was interesting is back on July 19th, the day I was doing the show. The Free Press was running a sampling of six letters to the editor. Now I say the Free Press because these letters are actually some of them were from Calgary and elsewhere.

So I guess maybe it’s really the Sun because of course the Sun is now publishing the Free Press. But of the six people that they picked for their comments on what they thought about both Elizabeth May and Tom Harris, I was just astounded and I’ll tell you why.

For example, first letter here from a fellow here in London, M.A. Halstein, he says, there’s no question, quote, Tom Harris’s contention that there is vigorous debate among scientists regarding carbon dioxide emission effects is disingenuous. There is an effort by climate change skeptics to convince the public that there is scientific debate on climate change when in fact there is little within peer-reviewed science. Many of the same scientists who are publicly questioning climate change now were hired by tobacco industries years ago to publicly question whether or not tobacco was harmful.

Many of them have not been published in 10 or more years.

I’m thinking, well, what’s that got to do with anything? I mean, it’s a complete non-sequitur and he doesn’t name any of the scientists.

Was Tom one of these guys? He never said anything about that.

Again, here’s someone who does the opposite. He’s picking on Elizabeth May and I’ve done that many times too, but pick on her for the right reasons, not for this reason, for heaven’s sakes, as Lauren Hamilton of Etobicoke says in the headline, Read’s Discredited Source. Green Party leader Elizabeth May brings us more of her leftist twaddle on climate change and cites a report by Britain’s Sir Nicholas Stern, who is not a climatologist or a scientist, but rather an economist.

Okay, so if you’re an economist, you’re not allowed to talk about global warming.

God, where does that leave me?

And then here’s another one, Ridiculous Notion by Tim Scott in Berry. Here’s one simple reason why Elizabeth May’s idea is a horrible one. Imagine any government implementing a new tax and cutting other taxes to offset it. Ridiculous.

Well, that’s probably the kindest comment I heard out of the six, because this is just basically cynicism talking, but again, it’s more emotion than it is fact.

Another one titled A Myopic View by D.W. McKenzie in Cherry Valley.

Tom Harris’s group does not reveal where it gets its funding. Figures don’t lie, but liars figure.

Well, aren’t facts still facts? Does it matter who pays you to find them? Aren’t they reviewed and criticized by everyone publicly?

You don’t determine the result of a science by who paid the person to do it. Who are you going to blame for me? I just told you now I’m doing this for free, so how? I agree with a lot of these people, so am I being paid too? Is there some secret source of money? I wish it was.

Tell me where the account is, because I want to open it right now.

But here’s another one. Feeling a little lonely Roger Gagney in Calgary, who says that Tom Harris is not a scientist, but a mechanical engineer. He’s happy to stand in defiance of the overwhelming majority of climate scientists who agree that global warming is unequivocally related to greenhouse gas emissions and mostly from human sources.

Thanks to research grants from ExxonMobil, there’s still a couple of dozen scientists who agree with Tom, so he needn’t be too lonely. At least he could organize a barbecue.

Okay, maybe a barbecue under the hot sun today.

Another one. Feeling outnumbered by Robert Coulter in St. Albert.

Yeah, right Tom. More than 2,000 scientists worldwide are wrong and you, a hired gun for the oil and gas industry, are right. Why does that not surprise me?

So there’s your sampling of the type of thinking. Not a single idea in there. And with the exception of Tim Scott’s pure expression of cynicism, all of them were ad hominem attacks on the messengers. They were attacking the messenger and not paying attention to the message at all.

I’m surprised that they didn’t pick on their skin color or heritage while they were at it.

Not one idea or concept was mentioned in any of their criticisms. And when I read them, and this may be unfair to some of them, I know that letters to the editor are edited, but if that’s the best they could pick out of these letters, I mean, these are people who aren’t thinking independently. They’re just social metaphysicians, as they say. They get their ideas totally from the people around them and they think that an idea’s validity is determined by its number of adherents.

Obviously they don’t know the history of Albert Einstein, who was totally derided by the scientific community until he said, no, this is the way it is. It only takes one guy to prove me wrong.

You don’t need to gang up on them.

So, there just seems to be some contempt for objectivity and knowledge. It’s very evident. And you read this stuff and you can tell, and I’m picking on people on both sides here, not just the ones that picked on Tom, but you can hear it. They’ve made up their minds.

They’ve got their belief systems in place and, even worse, and this is the worst part, each of them is completely wrong, both in relationship to the so-called facts they raise and to the validity of the method by which they arrive at their conclusions.

If I were publishing a newspaper, I wouldn’t have published those letters. Not if you’re out to inform people. That’s for sure.

I think the letters were all mean-spirited, each and every one. No facts, no ideas, just some sort of religious disagreement. And consensus is not science, okay?

For example, it’s funny, here’s one guy who says, Tom was not a scientist but a mechanical engineer. Well, so was one of these critics, the first guy I read, who agreed with him. So does that cancel out his opinion? Because he’s an engineer too. And he’s disagreeing with Tom.

So is he qualified to have an opinion?

And that each of these writers relies on that mythical 2000 scientists agree argument is a sign of… Just they’re not even thinking, they haven’t even done any research.

First of all, way more than 2000 scientists signed the Oregon Petition against Kyoto, which I’ve referred to many times on this show, including clips from 20/20’s John Stossel indicating the same and many other sources. And even more so, Tom Harris himself, when he was on this show, I asked him about that very statistic. I said, 17,000 scientists signed the Oregon Petition and he corrected me. He said, no, it wasn’t 17, over 17,000 signed. That is true. But he said only 8 to 9,000 of them were bona fide scientists.

So even if you take that figure, 8 to 9,000, that outnumbers the 2000 figure that the letter writers are all using.

I mean, again, don’t get me wrong here. This is not a valid argument. I myself am not saying that because there’s 9,000 on Tom’s side that he’s right and 2000 on the other. That’s not the point here.

What I’m pointing out is that the whole debate is irrelevant on that point. And moreover, if you even watch An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s propaganda piece, his figure’s not even in the thousands. It’s only around 900.

He talks about 900 papers.

So just again, part of my frustration on an issue like that, who do you have to be to be knowledgeable to discuss the issue? You don’t have to be anyone. You just have to know a little bit about science, principles, look and see. There’s some validity to looking at other people’s opinions. And science is never, by the way, settled, ever, ever. And just because new ideas come along that replace the old ones, it doesn’t always invalidate the old ones either.

It may just add to them.

Now, that was one of the two subjects that the paper, the London Free Press, had on the same day I was discussing them. And the other one, of course, was with respect to the discovery that Canadians smoke more pot than anyone else does in the world, according to a UN report that was released about two, three weeks ago. And again, the Free Press on the 19th on the same day, same page, right beside the other article, was an article by, or a commentary by Lynn Coburn called Canada Goes to Pot.

And what she did in this article basically was say, okay, it’s not really Canada. You can blame it all on Quebec. She said, thank God for Quebec. She says, quote, now in a spectacular gesture of rapprochement with Canada’s other nine provinces and three territories, they’ve admitted to doing more pot than the rest of us. The UN report stated that Canadians use marijuana four times more than people in any other developed country, but not to worry, a breakdown of the figures supplied by Quebec showed that 32% of their students in grades seven to nine have toked up at least once in the past year, leaving BC in the dust at 18%. So overall, marijuana use in Quebec runs about 12% higher than the national average.

Either that, or people in Quebec are 12% more honest about answering the question here than they might be in the rest of Canada.

It has to be difficult to collect accurate information about drug use and issues that are either in a gray area legally or completely illegal entirely, because a lot of people aren’t going to admit to using things when they know that there is a legal sanction against it.

Here, Lynn Coburn, she goes on. She says, by the way, the Netherlands, which has decriminalized marijuana use, came in at a trifling 6.1%, a figure which, of course, turned on the Canadian proponents of decriminalization.

Well, it didn’t turn me on in any way, I can’t say, because I’m one of those proponents, and I don’t think it’s the reason to decriminalize or legalize. It’s irrelevant, how many people do it.

Is it just? Is it just for a government to take some of its citizens because it disapproves of their behavior, harmful or not, and to punish them by putting them in jail or fining them? If you and I cannot do it as a free citizen, our governments cannot do it. I do not have the right to go next door to my neighbor and tell them, I don’t like that booze you’re drinking.

It’s not my brand, or you’re drinking too high a proof, or your cigarettes smell funny. Now, if it’s coming over to my property, that’s another issue.

But interestingly, she quotes Eugene Oscapella, an Ottawa lawyer who specializes in drug policy issues, who notes, quote, the criminal law does not prevent people from using marijuana, nor does legalization force people to use it, which is an interesting flip on that particular point of view.

Meanwhile, in a sort of a new twist on the whole marijuana issue overseas, they got a new prime minister now that Tony Blair stepped down, and they have a new decision made under Blair’s administration to effectively recriminalize the drug. And they say that they’re concerned about recent medical research suggesting more links between pot smoking and mental health disorders, etc., etc.

None of that, none of the research on pot is new folks. Everything that could be said about pot has been said. It’s the most researched drug in history. It’s just outrageous. What I read today in the papers when they tell you something new about it, I could pick a paper 20, 30 years old that says the very same thing. There’s really not a lot new going on there.

Interestingly, some drug awareness groups in England are accusing the government of trying to score political points since they know that their cannabis use among their young people is falling.

It’s funny, I guarantee you if 51% of Canadians still smoked cigarettes, you wouldn’t have seen any of the no smoking restaurant laws or any of that stuff, because they just wouldn’t get voted in.

So, there’s just some follow-up on a couple issues we did a couple weeks ago. And when we return after this next break, we’ll be talking a little bit, something new I haven’t talked about on the show yet, because it kind of caught my attention last week.

And that is photo radar in Ontario and highway speed limits. And we’ll be back right after this little interlude.

Clip (Stand-up Comedian)
This is one of my rotten college bits. Any college students?

Alright. It’s called graduation day. A light breeze off the river causes a tassel on my graduation cap to blow straight up in the air. Straight up through the clouds, through the sky. Is this some subtle sign from God that from this day on, my life is headed straight up? Or is this just really great weed?

[Laughter]

I tell you people in the big cities here, you drive like, just gosh darn it, too fast.

That’s what I’m trying to say. I’m living in Edmonton now and everybody’s, it’s 110 on the highways, we go 110. It’s 100 out here, so you guys go whatever the frick you want to go. I’m crying, it’s at night time. I don’t even see lights, I just see red streaks going by here.

I’m crying. There is the odd person that slows down to take a look to see what I look like. You know those people that look at you to drive by, what’s your problem?

Bob Metz: Welcome back to Just Right. I’m Bob Metz and this is CHRW Radio 94.9 FM where you can call in 519-661-3600 if you’re bearing the heat out there today or email us at justrightchrw@gmail.com.

Highway speed limits came up a lot lately. Apparently 70% of Ontarians say they want photo radar according to the past president of Canada’s Safety Council who I heard in the electronic media last week.

I’m not even sure what station I was listening to. But some interesting issues about photo radar, everybody thinks that it would solve some of the carnage on our highways by slowing people down and getting people to get closer to the speed limit. Well, for me that never really made sense, which I’ll explain shortly, but it seems that there are some studies out there that support my point of view that slowing people down increases accidents. It does not decrease them and fatalities as well.

But what I did find was in a National Post July 5th there was an article slash editorial called Photo Radar Isn’t the Answer by John Turley-Ewert. And he talks about, yes, we’ve had more fatalities this year than last in Ontario. There’s been 191 fatalities up to July 5th at least compared to 153 during the same period last year.

When I look at numbers like that just for partial year period fatalities in Ontario on our highways and then you compare them to the total deaths of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan over five years, those deaths would amount to about four days worth of traffic fatalities in Ontario.

But nevertheless, the article in the National Post talks about how Ontario’s original photo radar experiment quote was politically unpopular, which is why it was cancelled in 95 by Mike Harris’s Conservative government. Interestingly, both the province’s governing Liberals and opposition Conservatives learned from that, which is why neither has been willing to hop on the photo radar bandwagon. And apparently Dalton McGuinty has already made it clear he’s not going that direction.

He’s going to try and find other ways to deter speeding. And of course the editorial agrees that that is the right approach because photo radar is not the way to stop fatal highway accidents. And what they cite here in terms of their evidence is, 12 years have gone by since Ontarians had photo radar. But British Columbia, which dumped photo radar only in 2001, and Alberta, which still uses it, offer very timely evidence.

In these jurisdictions, photo radar failed to end the statistical carnage on their roads and highways. They also say that setting it up is very expensive, although I saw a contrary claim to that, which I’ll get to in a moment, but in this case anyway, they talk about when BC launched its initiative in 96, the total project was $60 million. So to recover an outlay like that, you’ve got to give a lot of people a lot of tickets to recover that $60 million. So there’s an incentive to not only have speeders, but to recover your money that way.

And they showed that a breakdown of driving fatalities in Ontario in 2004, 1,208 deaths that year, only 84 of them were attributed to what they would consider illegal speeding, with another 81 attributed to driving too fast for the prevailing road conditions. In other words, the other 81 were still probably within the legal limit, but driving too fast, because it was snowy or rainy or foggy or whatever.

And what they do find is, according to the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in a very broad study, that 80% of all police reported car crashes were caused by driver distractions. Of course, that’s the big thing today. It’s all cell phones, according to most people, which is an issue, no doubt.

But that’s the main thing, is driver distraction, which can be caused by just about anything.

But here, between 1973, when Canadian road fatalities peaked at 6,706, can you imagine? In 2004, when they dropped to 2,775, that’s a 59% drop. Now, what the government says the reason for this is, is that they introduced, of course, drinking and driving laws in 1969.

It wasn’t a big issue until then, believe it or not. You would just get ticketed, and people would drive drunk all over the place, even more than they do today. And of course, safety standards and mandatory seatbelt usage and improvements in airbags and technology. All of these things helped reduce fatalities.

In Germany, though, now here’s the one, you always hear about Germany and the Autobahn. Apparently, their reduction in fatalities was even greater. Statistics collected by Germany’s Federal Highway Research Institute shows that the country, with its famed Autobahn, and they have no speed limit there on large stretches of it, has a better record of reducing road fatalities than Canada. Between 1970 and 2005, deaths as a result of car accidents dropped by 72%. And they say that’s because, in addition to the things Canada is doing, they’re doing those too, but also they engineer their highways and roads to be a little more forgiving of driver error, so that if you go off the road a bit, it kind of pushes you back on.

And just in that context, I have an uncle who actually passed away on the Autobahn of a heart attack and did not get involved in a car accident.

He was able to pull over and pull off, and they found him there, but he didn’t cause an accident and somehow it was still safe for the rest of the drivers, so there’s a little personal touch.

Now, on the other side of the scale, I was listening on the radio last week, and a number of the stations are all talking about everyone wanting photo radar, 70% say it works. And, when somebody says something works, always ask the question, at what?

Because generally, look at the goal, and usually that’s as far as it goes. Yes, photo radar works at slowing down traffic, it does. But it also works at increasing fatality rates, and the reason for this is interesting.

Now, apparently, toward the end of the Harris regime, and I don’t have this piece in front of me, unfortunately, but I was aware of it and someone else brought it to my attention again when they were talking on the radio. But they put out a study, and I guess the only paper that really ever reported on it at some time was the Toronto Star. And they did it on photo radar, and they found out that where photo radar was in use, speeds did decrease, but the fatality rates skyrocketed because of rear-end collisions, which sounds to me kind of logical. And they observed the same results at traffic lights using photo cameras at the intersection. And what would happen psychologically is if somebody would approach one of these areas, they’d suddenly slow down, hit on their brakes, or they think they can’t get through the light on the yellow, so they slam the brake on and the guy behind them hits them, okay?

And that’s simply what happens.

Now, basically the way I look at it is that speed does not kill. It does not kill, they tell you it does, but of course if you’re going to collide with something at a high speed, you could be killed. But speed alone, if speed alone killed, everyone who ever flew in a jet plane wouldn’t survive the journey.

Collisions is what kill, of course. And so the key is to reduce congestion on our highways, and the greater probability of collisions comes from the proximity that you have to other vehicles on the road. So to me, higher speed limits are a logical way to reduce carnage on the road.

If you’re driving safely, you can’t be distracted and going back and forth and playing with your cell phone and stuff like that, but just taking it on its basic level. For example, suppose I drive from London to Toronto in one and a half hours instead of two hours. Now what does that mean? It means I’m on the road for 25% less time.

I’m literally not there, I’m not an object to be hit. On the other hand, if I slow down and take three hours to get to Toronto, I’m on the road for 33% longer, and that increases my odds of being in an accident by either my being more tired because I’m driving longer, because of greater traffic density, because everyone’s going slower and being more in proximity to each other on the road all at one time.

And there’s a natural factor in this as well. Everybody says, oh, the speed limit is 100, but everybody’s going faster. The fellow, it was Kevin McGrath in that clip who said, he lives in Edmonton where the speed is 110, and they drive 110. You come here, it’s 100, and everybody goes really faster.

I observed the same thing when I used to drive through the States, where the speed limits were set quite high.

Everyone observed them. When they were set a little too low, 55 miles an hour here and there, you’d see people speeding far more often and far higher sometimes than you would expect them to.

Now of course, part of the reason is the way the roads are built. Many of you might not remember when the 401 and 400 series were built. They were graded for 70 miles an hour, which of course is around 110, 120-ish in there, which is really the natural speed of the highway. And that’s what taxpayers paid for.

They were promised this 70-mile-an-hour course to get them from wherever to Toronto and back and forth much quicker than what they were used to.

So nevertheless, so many other issues with cameras. They only make a technical judgment. There are many people who get a ticket with photo radar. You don’t even have to drive.

You can be sitting at home and have your car parked in the garage and you get a ticket in the mail because some machine read somebody’s license the wrong way.

So, it’s not that straight an issue in any case that speed kills and that slowing everyone down will solve the problem. It just doesn’t.

It doesn’t work.

About 10 percent, a little under 10 percent of tickets are disputed. So that’s a lot of tickets. Here in Ontario, I think somebody quoted that they were producing $16 million revenue and the system only cost $700,000. Well, no, not the system.

Operating costs maybe, but not the system.

So, and of course it decreases the belief that there should be fewer police on the roads actually watching for things of that nature.

So that’s my take on the whole photo radar and speed limits. I think speed limits should be actually raised a little bit. I think you’d see a little more sense on the roads. And I know right now they’re working on 401 being six lanes all the way from basically Montreal to Windsor, which will help the congestion a little bit.

That’s it for now.

We’re going to come back right after this next break with a few more follow-ups on issues that we’ve covered on past shows. But first, this little thought and a smile.

Clip (Stand-up Comedian)
I’m going to tell you I’m a good driver. I’m probably one of the best drivers you ever see. Great driver. In fact, I drive so well I figure, hey, I’ll go a little faster than everybody else. How do they treat a good driver like me?

What do they do? Took my driver’s license. Yeah, I don’t have a license, which means now I have to be really careful when I drive.

Clip (Dennis Miller)
There are people who define themselves in America now solely through agitation. They have no life except yours. So they presume to get involved and presumption begat advocacy and advocacy begat political correctness. And political correctness is just inverted McCarthyism. And believe me, I don’t throw the word McCarthyism around lightly because I just saw St. Elmo’s Fire again on TV the other night.

And I was reminded how truly God awful he was in that.

Bob Metz: You’re listening to Just Right on CHRW 94.9 FM. My name’s Bob Metz and you can call in 519-661-3600 or email us at justrightchrw@gmail.com.

Again, a couple of stories I had been working on past shows. I never really got to them. I’ve got a few of them because of course we get guests from time to time and that pushes another issue back.

But most of these issues don’t really date themselves, at least the ones that I try to choose for the show. And you may recall there was some time ago I had guest John Thompson from the Mackenzie Institute. It was on May 31st, I believe, talking about terrorism in the world and World War III, etc., etc. But interestingly enough, John actually believed that we’re sort of in the start of World War III and you could almost call it that because there are many fronts on which a common kind of war is being fought.

And what was interesting is that London Free Press on July 12th ran an article with the headline World War III, question mark, many Canadians fear Third World War looms by Terry Pedwell, C.P. reporter.

Now according to a Canadian Press Decima Research Survey, 46% of respondents to an online poll, of course that’s a little bit suspect there, but nevertheless, they thought there’d be another World War within the next 50 years. Almost one in four, 25%, think it will happen in less than 10 years, while 13% thought it would take longer.

17% said it would never happen.

I often wonder if you had asked that question of the average American, Japanese, German, or whoever just in the months before World War II whether they thought that would ever happen, what kind of results you might have gotten.

But Canadian historian Michael Bliss says that if a Third World War were to take place, it would involve nuclear bombs and start in one of the world’s hot spots. We’ll be lucky if nuclear weapons aren’t used in the next 20 years in the Middle East, says Bliss.

Now, I find it interesting that people think that in order to have a quote, World War III or a World War of any sort, you have to have these weapons of mass destruction that without them you don’t really have a bona fide war.

A lot of the weapons that we use that target things very directly can be just as deadly. And we didn’t use that many. Two nuclear weapons have been used basically to end the last war, as people might argue. But if you’re waiting for a nuclear weapon to signify the beginning of a war, you’re going to be way behind the fact.

By the time a nuclear weapon is dropped, we’re probably already at it in many ways.

I imagine many people who lived through the last few World Wars who were not on the front and were not in military service may not really have been aware of it in their day-to-day life other than, of course, the news reports and such, which would not have been at that time as intensive as it is today. Of course, Vietnam was the war that they said was ended because of the television camera being there right on the front lines.

But what I found interesting was that whereas the Canadian public in general seems to be rather optimistic about either a war never happening or it won’t happen for 50 years, that’s a pretty long time. A lot can happen in 50 years. But the more one is an expert or closer to being an expert like Michael Bliss that I just quoted here, the shorter the time is involved where they seem to expect a World War. In fact, my May 31st guest John thought himself that we’re already in it now.

It’s just a lot of people haven’t woken up to it.

So I just think it’s just one of those odd debates that will go on for quite some time.

Another subject to follow up again, going away from prospects of war, which we don’t really like to talk about too much if we can avoid it, the monarchy. I did a show on Canada Day about the monarchy and talked about how the monarchy might have been surprising. I wouldn’t support a monarchy blindly, but the one we have is called a constitutional monarchy. I talked about it as a form of the state of government, comparing it a little bit to a republic.

My suggestion was that both forms are quite compatible with a government that could defend individual rights or violate them. I mean, there’s no guarantee. It’s always up to the people to make that guarantee.

But there was a debate in the Free Press between Michael Coren and Christina Blizzard. The monarchy, Royal Rumble, point counterpoint it was.

I think the column should have been called Missing the Point because when I read it, again, they made the biggest single mistake. It was the first thing I pointed out in my opinion on the monarchy. And then they were talking about the royal family and not the institution of the monarchy itself.

Yeah, you can complain and bitch about the royal family all you want. They’re sometimes laughable, but I think a lot of people don’t realize what they actually go through.

I have watched some documentaries both on the Queen and on other members of the family, and of course presenting them in a more positive light and what they do. And I’ll tell you, most of you wouldn’t want their jobs for just about anything. You’d have to give up a lot of your freedoms to be in their situation, that’s for sure.

But my argument was that neither a republic nor a constitutional monarchy, which ironically was a term not even mentioned in their debate, is any guarantee of anything, that both are compatible. So the same thing happened with the people who there was a sampling of letters to the editor again that said the same thing. And we’re sort of like the letters that were written about Tom Harris, everybody complaining about their own personal thing and not really getting to the point.

So again, another reason why I’m enjoying doing this show and will continue to do this show hopefully for many weeks and a long time to come.

But that’s it for today. I am told by Ira over there that I’ve got to wrap it up. Time is up. We must be running near the noon hour and what’s the temperature out there by now?

It must be hitting well into the 30s by now.

So until next week, when we will continue our journey in the right direction, be right, stay right, do right, act right and think right. And we’ll see you then.

Take care.

Clip (Stand-up Comedian)
I wrote a love poem. Could I chime you guys? A little change of mood? Can we dim the lights a little bit? Perfect. Little music, little background music?

Is there a band here somewhere or something? Yeah, that’s nice, right? If you ever had your heart broken or whatever.

There’s a love poem it’s called, Are You Getting Prettier or Am I Just Lowering My Standards? I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to two. I looked at your face and I thought, hmm, she’ll do.

The end.