RTE Roundtable Talk #11: Citizen vs. State (Transcript)
Featuring Karl Harrison
See our other Roundtable discussions here.
Transcript
Liam Sturgess: [00:00:00] Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Rounding the Earth Podcast. Rounding the Earth is a popular newsletter series published on Substack, written by applied statistician and educator Mathew Crawford. Topics of discussion range from critical analysis of conventional wisdom to Bitcoin and everything in between.
And of course, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic, which is once again, Part of our topic for today, Our goal is a careful examination of important topics and perspectives shaping the world that too few people [00:01:00] talk about. Subscribe to Rounding the Earth on Substack, Rumble, YouTube, and now Rokfin to join a burgeoning research community and to help us un-flatten the Earth.
My name is Liam Sturgess and I am a musician, music producer, writer/editor, coming at you live from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and I'll be your host for today. But as always, we have the man himself. Allow me to introduce the author of Rounding the Earth, my co-host, Mathew Crawford. Good morning or slash afternoon for you, Mathew.
Mathew Crawford: It's just now afternoon. We're two minutes.
Liam Sturgess: I love it. How was your weekend? You had a bit of an adventure.
Mathew Crawford: Yeah, I had a good weekend. took a four and a half day trip and went hiking a little bit, went down into Carlsbad Caverns which I don't know if you, if you're familiar with Carlsbad, but it's this gigantic Cavern cave in Southeast New Mexico and like 750 feet over, like a two and a half mile windy path.
And then you have these, these amazing, you know, the whole thing's amazing. But you [00:02:00] know, these amazing cave formations and, and there's one part that looks like, I don't know, almost like a, a magical king in a queen and in what's called the throne room. You, you could imagine you know indigenous peoples walking down there and finding this stuff and going, Those are my gods
Wow. The whole thing is just spectacular though. It's great cave and they keep finding more caves down there.
Liam Sturgess: I hope you took some pictures. I wanna see some of this.
Mathew Crawford: I did, I did. I'll share some, some time on Substack.
Liam Sturgess: That sounds great. Okay. Well, speaking of trips our guest today that we're, we're gonna be talking to about some of the significant challenges in taking a trip like yours for us Canadians.
Like many people around the world, there have been various measures put in place some more lawful than others in order to allegedly curb the spread of, of the COVID-19 disease, but it's caused some issues. So allow me to bring in my friend Karl Harrison. How are you Karl?
Karl Harrison: Thank you, Liam.
Very good.
Mathew Crawford: Very nice to meet you Karl.
Karl Harrison: Nice [00:03:00] to meet you. I haven't had, is it quite an exciting a week as you seem to have had and so far as I haven't been caving in New Mexico, but,
Mathew Crawford: Yeah, it was it was good to, to get out. We all need to stretch our legs sometimes, so, you know, find your adventure at least for a weekend.
Liam Sturgess: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, and, and I was under the impression you might be traveling today or tomorrow. Is that right, Karl?
Karl Harrison: No. I, I was used to be traveling and will be traveling next week, so we're off to, well, traveling within Canada anyway, We'll be off to Ottawa for the sort of first round of our in court battle with the, with, with the government in the federal court in Ottawa.
So I'll be traveling there next, next Tuesday, and we'll see how we get on in the first part of that on the Wednesday.
Liam Sturgess: Incredible. Well, that's, that's amazing timing then. I wasn't aware that was the purpose of your travel. Well, that's a great introduction. Can you just briefly explain what it is you are talking about and maybe just give us some background for, for members of the audience perhaps, who are hearing from you for [00:04:00] the first.
Karl Harrison: Yeah, no, sure. That, that's fine. I mean obviously the the, the, the pandemic in Canada has led to the Canadian government introducing various supposedly health related measures to to, to control the spread. And, and one of the the, the measures they brought in as, as many of the your listeners will know are a range of proof of vaccination requirements.
And one I personally consider them to be ineffective and fairly odious and coercive and divisive. But one of the worst of those is perhaps the mandate that they brought in to prevent probably five or 6 million Canadians from traveling because they hadn't undergone a medical therapy by having some injections.
And that was imposed upon Canadians in in October, November of 2021 and was recently suspended in the end of June of this year. And that's a set of measures that we set about challenging in the federal court [00:05:00] starting in December. And and it's, it's ongoing at the moment, and we, we, we believe that the, the prime primary success of that so far has been to push the government into a suspension of those measures at the end of June, which is which is the, the most positive thing to have come out of it to so far, along with some revelations that have arisen from cross examination of government witnesses in the case.
So that's, that's, I mean, I, I'm just a, an ordinary Canadian citizen and a businessman and, you know, in with the British and Canadian citizenship, and I'm working with Another another, another Canadian, and also with British citizenship called Sean Rickard, who's my co-applicant based in Ontario. And a wonderful lawyer called Sam Velos, who is 30 years old with a, a mind, much older and, and a skill set that dwarfs many in his profession.
And not with a great deal of experience, constitutional law, but doing a fantastic job for us. And and [00:06:00] we'll, we'll see how we get on when we actually get to court.
Liam Sturgess: Now, you, you, you dropped a number of very interesting things that I'm gonna have us pursue in a bit. Before we do that, take us a little further back.
You're a British citizen and a Canadian citizen. You were born in Britain. Can you give us what, what brought you to where you are now in your life? Give us your personal backstory.
Karl Harrison: I, I was born in the uk Yeah. I was born in a place in northwest England called Blackpool, which is famous for a Victorian tower amongst other, amongst other elaborate features.
But I spent most of my life in London in the uk. Went there when I was 17 and met my long term partner, Emma, in London. We're still here, we are 30 years later, but we're in Canada. We, I I, I have a, I I have a, I have Canadian family, so I've got a long history with Canada. My great grandfather immigrated into Canada in 1909 and was an original [00:07:00] homesteader in Saskatchewan.
And he set up a farm on 10 acres of land in Eton, in the, in the prairies. And so I was, I, I had a family coming to visit me from Canada in the 1960s when when I was a child, and right the way through into the seven. And I, I kind of got my, my initiation into thinking about Canada at that time from, from those relatives.
And I really loved them and I loved what they seemed to stand for. And they were more relaxed than us, Brits, for sure. And they, and, and they had had a different life. And so that was the start of adventure. We started traveling to Canada in the 1990s when my oldest friend moved here. And he married a Canadian girl and was living in Ontario.
And so we used to come and visit him and have these wonderful experiences and go camping and, you know, just getting out in the, in the back country in Ontario there and having a wonderful time with the, with my son at the time. So we fell in love with Canada then. It all seemed so easy compared to what I was used to.
It was great. It had a, it had a backyard [00:08:00] I'd never seen before. And and I've always had an interest in that. So we started coming and gradually we edged towards living here and after six years of an application process, then we came in through Quebec and eventually ended up living in British Columbia where we are now.
And and, and here we are. So, and and that's kind of my backstory, really. I'm a businessman. I've been in lots of different sectors primarily in the hospitality sector with lots of restaurants and bars and nightclubs in London, in the uk, some music venues and comedy venues. But I've also been involved in the music business.
The, I, I've lost money in the film sector like many people have. I've you know, been involved in investing in sport in the us and. I've been an occasional writer, a satirical writer for quite a well known magazine in the UK called Private Eye. And so that, that's as, that's probably as, as, as much as is sensible to say at the moment.
But that's, that's my backstory. And we we're, now, my family and I are now Canadian [00:09:00] citizens. We became Canadian citizens in very proudly in 2015.
Liam Sturgess: Now, the introduction of this travel mandate it's, it's my understanding that having watched for example, congratulations on your very high profile interview with Jordan Peterson and your co-applicant and lawyer.
That was a very, very excellent interview. And through that and a few other appearances you've made, the mandate came across to you, if I'm not mistaken, as rather un Canadian. Am I right?
Karl Harrison: Very un Canadian. And it came across to me and the, and equally I think the reaction of many Canadians to, it seemed to me to be un Canadian.