INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT METZ

Q: Tell us about your early background, where you grew up and what intellectual influences shaped your development.

Metz: It's difficult to say exactly about what shaped my early "intellectual" (i.e., philosophical) development, except when I look back I can see that when I was a kid I used to collect comic books. I found the comic books I liked best were done by people like Steve Ditko and the Marvel Group. Lo and behold, I found out much later, when I was already active in politics, that all those artists and writers were very much affected by Ayn Rand and her philosophy. Maybe that's where I picked up a lot of Objectivism.

Q: So where did you grow up?

Metz: Right here in London, Ontario, where I still live today. I went both to a separate school system, which was Roman Catholic, here in the province of Ontario and the public school system. So I'm a product of both.

Q: Did you find that you learned more with the Roman Catholic?

Metz: No, I found no fundamental difference between the two at all. In fact, it shocked me how little difference there was. I was indoctrinated about the superiority of the separate system, in terms of teaching "values", and when I switched to the public system I often wondered why the big fuss.

Q: Did you have a Catholic family?

Metz: Not in a strict sense. My mother went to church; my father was an atheist.

Q: Interesting combination!

Metz: Yes, very.

Q: So what other education did you have; did you go to college?

Metz: Yes. Actually I started college going into a radio/television broadcasting arts course. Within six months, I learned how much the government regulated and basically told everybody in the industry what to do. So I decided not to go into that field. So I went to work for six months, returned to college the following year, entered a business administration program, and graduated from that. I soon became the senior corporate accountant and then later supervisor for real estate accounting of a large trust company here for about ten years.

Q: How did you become interested in Ayn Rand, when did that happen?

Metz: That's a little novel in and of itself. I was very congenially coerced to putting my name in the hat for election back in the late '70s for a political party I had never heard of before, called the Libertarian Party. A friend of mine basically talked me into this as a favor to him. I have to be very frank; I did not know, at that point in time, what a "Liberal" was or a "Conservative" or a "New Democrat" which are the three major parties we have up here in Ontario. I had no idea what any of them represented. So I went into a crash training course, and discovered that they all represented socialism, though in varying degrees. Someone told me I should read a book by Ayn Rand called Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. I read it, and found that it made eminent sense. On the basis of a handful of chapters I found it very easy to get through the all-candidates debates, and found that my ability to sway argument was incredible. In fact, just getting up in front of a crowd and saying something different gets more attention and rivets more of the focus on you than you can possibly imagine. As soon as I entered the fray, the point of reference becomes me; all the other candidates would speak to my points.

Q: So when and how did you become involved with Freedom Party. And what's your position in it?

Metz: Well, I am a founding member of the Freedom Party, and I'm currently the Ontario president, and have been since its inception. I was the party leader up until late '93. Our current party leader is Jack Plant, who joined us in 1988. I never really intended to start or get involved with a political party. We had been locally affiliated with an offshoot, here in Ontario, of the Ontario Libertarian Party called "Unparty". And it seemed to be a little bit more aggressive and assertive about the way it was marketing itself, although it was still making a lot of big mistakes, not the least of which was the name it chose. Nevertheless, I locally recruited for that party, and after a couple of years I found myself in the position of being the one person with the most successful constituency. And I was doing very simple things.

Q: Like what?

Metz: Holding regular meetings in a church basement every two months. Just a recruiting meeting: we would offer coffee and tea, have a little half-hour video of a taped interview with one of the party representatives, and discussion afterwards. From that I got a good fifty hard-core members out of about eight meetings. The meetings were quite an experience in themselves, because we never knew what to expect in terms of turnout. We had turnouts as low as two and as high as forty-five for the same effort.

Q: Why was there the difference?

Metz: Because a lot of attracting your target is luck. First of all the weather is a big factor, as is making sure you're not conflicting with other activities that people may be involved with. The odd night you hit it right and you have forty-five people who want to check out something different, and another night maybe people are otherwise occupied. You never know what you're competing with.

Q: So how did Unparty turn into the Freedom Party?

Metz: Late in 1983 I was involved with a fellow compatriot here in the city of London named Marc Emery who had a very high profile as a local individualist and a radical free thinker. Troublemaker. He began a newspaper called London Tribune in the early '80s. After losing a good half million dollars on that investment, we launched an experimental second newspaper in 1983 called The London Metro Bulletin. It was at this point in our publishing career that we were offered the registration of the Unparty by the people who founded it and were running it. The key figure was Mary Lou Gutcher, chairperson of the party in Toronto. She was officially retiring from politics and she suggested that since we had a successful local constituency and were very active politically, on a local level, that we might be interested in having the provincial registration of the party. What that means in concrete terms is tax credits. In Ontario, if someone contributes 200 dollars they get 150 of that back on their income tax return. So they can give us 200 at a cost to them of 50. That's a very powerful tool to have at your disposal. We officially changed the name of the party, which was a condition I imposed if I was going to take the party over. I did not want to run an "Unparty". I wanted to run a party that was very open and honest and straight-forward about the product it presented to the market-place, and that was freedom. We couldn't believe that the name "Freedom" wasn't already taken up by any political party! It just seems to be a word that nobody wants, yet any marketing survey will tell you that the general emotional response to the word is very positive. You'd think more people would be willing to use that word in their marketing, particularly in the political sphere. I think politicians were afraid to use that word until very recently.

Q: Well, what is the basic philosophy and platform of Freedom Party?

Metz: Our platform is summarized in a single sentence that we repeat quite often in all our literature and party publications, and that is: "that Freedom Party believes that the purpose of government is to protect individual freedom of choice, not to restrict it". We apply it to any issue that comes to our attention. Of course our platform is based on our statement of principle which states essentially that "Every individual in the peaceful pursuit of personal fulfillment has an absolute right to his or her own life, liberty and property."

Q: Some Objectivists look down on the Libertarians because they don't have a basic philosophy as far as metaphysics and epistemology. They don't consider those things; they just want to deal with lower level issues. Could that be a criticism of your party?

Metz: No, not for a minute. In fact it was my experience with the Libertarian Party that taught me a lot of what not to do.

Q: Like what?

Metz: Well, first of all don't try and sell a philosophy; operate on one. It's a totally different approach.

Q: How does one work and not the other?

Metz: By trying to sell a philosophy, we find ourselves engaged in the futile process of trying to "change people's minds" which simply does not occur as a consequence of a direct effort. You have to be indirect about how you change people's minds, and the best way to change them is by example. We believe that. And we set out on the premise that we were going to deliver a product, in very concrete terms, to the people who support us. We've done some very unique things that no political party anywhere in the world has done before.

Q: Like what?

Metz: Everything from picking up the garbage of a municipality to hosting dinners for people who have broken the law or been charged under various offenses. For example, I did something that was very "politically incorrect" over the past couple of years. I defended a local landlord who was dragged before Ontario's own version of the Gestapo, called the Human Rights Commission (HRC), for uttering a comment that was deemed to be "racially" motivated. I defended him successfully before an HRC tribunal, I'm pleased to say, and I did it by never accepting the HRC's fundamental premise for existing. I actually accused the HRC itself of being racist, which it undeniably is. The landlord was an immigrant himself (from Macedonia), and allowed his buildings to become primarily occupied by Asian immigrants from Viet Nam and Cambodia. He soon found himself in the unfortunate position of being unable to cope with the constant vandalism and destruction that was occurring in his apartment buildings. When interviewed about the situation by a local reporter for the London Free Press, the landlord, in his broken English, tried to explain who was responsible for the constant mess and vandalism in his buildings by saying: "They're like little pigs. They think they're still living in the jungle." Needless to say, the landlord's comments were immediately perceived by the media as being "racist", and the paper (along with a local "social activist" who is married to one of the paper's reporters) launched a smear campaign against the landlord that eventually included having him brought before an HRC tribunal. I forced the tribual to acknowledge that the only reason the landlord was even being investigated for the remark was because of HIS race, not the race of the majority of his tenants. I put the question to them bluntly: Would the comment have been considered "racist" if the landlord's race was Asian --- or if the majority of his tenants were Macedonian? Since the answer to that question was obviously "no", the fact that the HRC is racist could not be avoided. You should have seen all the red faces in the room.

Q: How did the public react to that?

Metz: Well, the public reacted very well, but the news media very negatively, because the media is still predominately very left-wing, very politically correct. In this particular case the media was even involved in instigating the situation directly. They had a very strong interest and were not too happy about my defending the landlord. It's a price I had to pay, and am quite willing to pay if I have to do things like that again.

Q: What has been your hardest battle?

Metz: I would say that that was one of the toughest because it's not over yet. There's much more to be going on this particular issue. One of our most significant successful battles was our very first campaign in 1985 which defeated the idea of London, Ontario spending 110 million tax dollars to host the 1994 Pan American Games. In order to dissuade the public from supporting this we delivered an 8-page brochure to every door in the city explaining the past experiences municipalities have had with this kind of spending, the foolhardiness of it, and the poor principle behind it. Virtually overnight we turned around every major politician's opinion on the issue. We lobbied provincial, federal, and municipal governments. We had a campaign going. We had eleven hundred subscribers to our No Tax For Pan Am Newsletter here in the city of London alone. It was a tough battle because we had to deliver the newsletter by hand because we were in the midst of a postal strike in that period.

Q: You sound like a real go-getter.

Metz: Well, you have to be. And you have to have fun at it, too. You have to find innovative ways of doing protests. We don't like the whole protest mentality, because a protest by its very nature indicates that you are against something, not in favor of something. So we protested, and I say that as a euphemism, in very different ways. There was a garbage strike, back in the mid-eighties. Rather than go down to city hall and protest with placards and pickets, we rented trucks and delivered pamphlets up and down the street telling people we'd come by the next day to pick their garbage up and to leave it out. We picked it up, and drove the garbage out to private landfill sites. This one effort got us coast-to-coast attention.

Q: How do you get people to help you though? How do you get regular citizens to pick up garbage? I find a lot of people, even Objectivists, are more armchair philosophers. It's difficult to really motivate people. How do you get them to pick up garbage, and deliver pamphlets by hand, and have the excitement to do that?

Metz: That's the very thing, you have the excitement. It's fun. It becomes a media event; people love to be on camera. We have fun with it. You had to be part of it to see how much fun the people involved were having.

Q: How do they know they're going to have fun? How do you motivate them initially?

Metz: You let them know what they're doing, why they're doing it, what to expect, and to the extent that you have been realistic (and how you treat them) they gain tremendous confidence in you. It has to be earned over a long period of time, especially if you want long-term credibility. People have to learn to trust you, and be able to count on you for the long term. Too many political movements and philosophic movements are fundamentally fads, that a lot of people go through because they're looking for something in their life at that particular moment. But they don't really affix themselves for a lifetime. Having said all that I have to go back to your comment how most people are armchair philosophers. That's absolutely true in any group, even in ours. The way to get around that is to recognize from the very beginning that the people who get things changed and the people who get the status and the reward are always the very few who choose to get involved. You can't waste your time going after the armchair philosophers. If they give you money and are happy to give that kind of support then you have to be satisfied with that, and not worry about motivating them into something that they're not interested in.

Q: But how do you find people who are active?

Metz: Again, I think it's a matter of luck to a degree, but in turn it's a matter of consistency. In my case I know that a big factor is that I'm here full-time. That's probably very rare for anybody to do what I'm doing on a full-time basis, basically being a political activist, lobbyist, writer, someone who gives speeches and public presentations and assists other groups.

Q: Can you make money at this, or do you have a bare subsistence?

Metz: Oh, I had to live on a bare subsistence for a long time and often you go through those periods. Now we're doing very well; in fact we're probably doing better now than at any other point in our history.

Q: Is Freedom Party gaining in popularity?

Metz: Absolutely. In our local southern Ontario area, I doubt you could run into many people who hadn't heard of us, even though we've never garnered more than three percent of the vote in the three elections we've fielded candidates in so far. But we have been around for ten years as Freedom Party. This year is our tenth anniversary. Here in Canada we're lucky if we have an election every five years. Our last one was five years ago, and we're expecting one in '95 to be called by our Premier of Ontario, Bob Rae. Should a majority government get elected it'll be another five years before the next election. So we don't get too many cracks at electoral success. We have to justify our existence on another premise, especially between elections.

Q: And how do you do it?

Metz: Well, it's two-fold. One is by being a service oriented organization, working with everybody and anyone from any camp. If you can find an area to agree with them and work with them then there's no reason why you should not. You don't have to compromise your principles to do it. Education is the other half of the coin. We probably publish more literature than all other political parties in the country combined. We publish two regular newsletters, Freedom Flyer and Consent. We're discovering, much to our surprise, that Consent is becoming a marketable item in itself, and has many American and overseas subscribers. It's an essay-oriented opinion magazine, and we're very pleased at the profile of the writers we're attracting recently. I'm very pleased with the general influence Freedom Party has had. We've beaten a lot of issues; we've taken on challenges, everything from fighting unions to city hall, and WON! I think that really sets people back when they see something like that.

Q: What do you see in the future for the Freedom Party? Do you have some long range goals; do you think you'll be Premier someday?

Metz: Well, that's not my personal aspiration, but it certainly is for the party. I'm very content to be doing what I'm doing now, and leaving the front line work to the people who prefer to do that. We've got a great leader now, Jack Plant, who had slowly but surely worked with the party until he felt he was in a position to take that leap. And we're growing around the province. We're constantly lobbying every level of government. Even though we are a registered party only for the province of Ontario, we do lobby the federal government and we lobby and give presentations to municipal governments. All that kind of work helps when there are candidates in the municipal elections, for example, who are sympathetic with our views. They may not agree with them hundred percent, but if the balance is in your favor you can be of assistance to them. Generally people will drop their guard when they see that your group is people oriented. I think too often intellectual movements simply travel on an intellectual wave, not realizing that what makes it click is its people. Socializing and having a good time is a major factor in being politically successful.

Q: Do you have any ideas about how to get Objectivism across to people that, say, an institute could use?

Metz: I believe that's what I'm doing. Before I got involved with Freedom Party, I recall quite literally sitting down and grabbing various books I was reading at the time, by people I respected, and I re-read their information focusing only on their specific suggestions of action, meaning both things you should do and things you should not do. I recall going through many of Ayn Rand's books. Milton Friedman. I went through William Simon's Time for Truth and a number of books of that nature. I was just looking for people who had experience and to see what their suggestions would be. I took all those suggestions to heart, and tried to apply them to Freedom Party. In that sense Freedom Party is probably unique, as well as in terms of the way it's structured and the way it operates.

Q: What sort of specifics could you focus on that you've learned and are using to make you different?

Metz: Number one is the way we structured the party. One of the greatest challenges to any political movement is the risk of losing its initial purpose. In our case that means the risk of straying from our statement of principle to appease the electoral process. We had to be able to know that we could do what was necessary without compromising our principles. So we structured accordingly. Our party does not operate so much on the principle of "democracy" as it does on merit, and input, and responsibility. We actually apply the principles we're trying to enunciate to the public. We've run into difficulties demonstrating our principles, but then we've learned from our mistakes and how to correct them. Sometimes just learning that makes it easier to relate to other people.

Q: How do you learn how to go around the principles without violating them? How do you deal with a situation where it seems that you have to?

Metz: You NEVER have to. You MUST have that commitment from a core group of supporters. For example, everyone on our provincial executive has a vote, but not anyone can get on our provincial executive. There is no process in which, without the existing provincial executive's approval, someone else can get in. This may sound elitist, but it is no such thing. It is essential that the people who set policy and who determine the philosophic direction of the party work together well and are agreed on fundamental principles. It CANNOT work any other way. If our supporters don't like what we're doing, then we'll lose their support. But if we stick to our principles and earn our support on that premise, we will be well protected against compromise and the problems it ultimately creates. One of the great dangers, and I've observed this in many other "democratic" organizations, is that they can start out, for example with a right-wing cause, and then become infiltrated by left-wing supporters who turn the group into a left-wing cause because they simply vote everything to a different direction. Hopefully, we've protected ourselves from that. Our members cannot vote on our statement of principle and neither can we, as the provincial executive. We have an excellent group of people in our executive who are very wary of anything we might do that would wander from principle. Yet, our general rule with our members and field organizers is that basically anything goes. They can do anything they want in terms of trying a campaign or trying a tactic, but they cannot violate our statement of principle (or secondarily our marketing principles) and still expect to remain associated with Freedom Party.

Q: How do you define your marketing principles?

Metz: We generally make it clear to our people how we want to be associated and how we want to be perceived. There has to be a consistency, so that we can be identified as a single organization. Quite often, I've noticed smaller groups in one city using one logo, for example, and members from the same group in another town using another color and logo. They're almost wasting their effort in the sense that they're not creating the identity that they wish to create. But this could also be because they don't even have an identity. Creating an identity is almost the first task of any political organization or organization of influence. You have to create an identity, and that's not as easy as it sounds. I would almost go so far as to suggest that if you've established the identity you want, you've already won the game. The rest is a just matter of time.

Q: Would you say though that principles are, sometimes, too abstract for a political debate? How do you discuss them to appeal to the voter?

Metz: Well, principles are NEVER discussed during an ELECTION debate unless you get a golden opportunity to inject one, but generally you have to stick to concrete issues and very common sense approaches to those issues. It can be driven by principle, but you can't enunciate it in such a way as to preach to people, if you know what I mean. We integrate our principles by being aware of the fact that they exist for the executive of the party to operate on. We don't expect all our members and supporters to be as committed to those principles as we must be. We make no demands on them to have to support our statement of principles. It's a moot point. Nobody can vote on it anyway. Some may only support us on a single issue, and we don't want to have to turn them away, nor do we want to give them a vote to affect our party's fundamental direction and premise. But we accept their support and we hope to influence them. If they support us on a single issue that they can relate to, that's a good time to influence them by relating our principles to their concern. They might come to see those principles applied to other issues. But until you've got their attention and their confidence, you're not really going to sell anybody anything.

Q: What sort of particular "people" skills have you learned to get ideas across or to just deal with people in the party, so they're not just arguing with one another?

Metz: Believe it or not, the biggest secret to learn is to let it go, which is not the same as giving up. But don't try so hard to convince people. When you act confident about yourself and about your ideas, and when you discuss them in a rational way at appropriate times, that's all you have to do. Getting people to change their minds is a very slow motion process. So many people undercut the success of what they've accomplished by expecting a result too soon. I've been at this full time, so I've had a very unique, front-row seat to this process because I get to see many of the same people over a long period of time. I've watched people who have come into our sphere of influence who have been everything from Marxist/Leninist to ultra-conservative become almost pin-point Objectivists today. And I never once suggested it to them. They ASK to borrow our Ayn Rand books; we don't suggest it to them.

Q: You mention her works casually?

Metz: Very casually, in a print or a quote at the bottom of one of our pages of Consent or just subtly anywhere. We have a framed portrait of Ayn Rand in our office here, and often that is enough. Someone asks, and that's when we speak to them. If you offer solutions to people when they're not asking for them, that can be a tragedy, even in personal relationships.

Q: Have you found that in a lot of people's conversation, they will tell you what they think about something, but they won't ask you what you mean by the statement you've made?

Metz: That's true, and these people need to be LISTENED to; they're not ready to buy your ideas. And certainly, many people will tell you things and make statements that maybe shouldn't be taken so literally either. A lot people come to me about certain concerns or certain issues, and it makes me uncomfortable, because my first reaction is that I'm going to have to tell this guy that I don't agree with him. Maybe he wants a government handout or something. But, if I listen to him long enough, I can hear a dozen other real problems underlying his concern. Then you can approach him in a different way, without being judgemental, and show how what he's looking for isn't the instant fix to his problem. Often, that "instant fix" they're looking for is just a call for help.

Q: How do you raise money for the party?

Metz: Strictly through voluntary donations, and the people who give us money are always kept informed of what we're doing. They receive all our publications, our newsletters, and our exclusive invitations to special events, seminars and dinners. We're an officially-registered party so residents of Ontario get tax credits for giving money to us. A tax credit is not a subsidy, by the way. A tax credit is only applicable to a contributor if he has Ontario taxes paid or payable. It's his own taxes he's directing toward us. It is not a government subsidy. If he had no taxes payable, the tax credit would not be of any use to him.

Q: Well, how do you motivate them to give money in the first place?

Metz: They have to be supportive of what you're doing, and the only way to motivate them is to keep them informed. Newsletters are the number one and the number two and the number three means of getting that support. But you have to have some content to put into the newsletter. Your newsletters have to say something or report something concrete.

Q: How do you get it into their hands in the first place?

Metz: Again this comes down to long term planning. When we began Freedom Party back in 1984, we knew, at that point in time, that it would probably be at least twenty years before we could be even considered as a credible, electable party in the eyes of the electorate. That's reality, and we had to expect not to get much more than one to three percent of the vote until we passed a certain credibility threshold. Too many people who get involved with new political parties do not understand this process. They think that a political party or a movement can come along with a great idea, and that the idea should sell itself. That's never what people are buying. People are buying the salesmen and the products of your ideas. We have to make the party credible, and since we can't get elected for twenty years we have to prove that we can accomplish something else. We've proven that we can affect issues so that their outcome is different. We've proven that we can get people elected, which we've done on the municipal scene. We've proven we can protest in positive ways. We've proven we can fight city hall and win. We've proven that we can go before a Human Rights Commission and use their own arguments against them; we've done it. And people support that. People admire it. I never cease to be amazed, and this is where a lot of people might not even be able to relate to what I'm going to say, but I never cease to be amazed at the generosity of people when they find a cause worth supporting. We have a hard core group of supporters, most of whom I don't even know personally, but who may give me upwards of two thousand dollars annually without blinking an eye. If you get enough of these people on your mailing list, you've got a going concern. But you have to keep working and always have an issue on the go. That in itself was another challenge I thought would be an obstacle: "What's going to be the next issue we're going to tackle, and how do we pick the right issue?" Well, I learned that you don't have to worry about which issues to tacle. They come to you, and you get to select and choose. And you choose the ones that will benefit your cause the best in the best way. That usually doesn't mean the easiest.

Q: You seem to be a pretty activist type person; how do you keep going day after day? I mean your country is in a worse state than ours! You're a lot more socialist, and you have a harder road to climb. A lot of Objectivists are very depressed because the state of the world is not the way they want it to be. How do you keep going day after day hearing bad reports of what's going on, and wake up every morning with smile on your face ready to tackle the next battle?

Metz: Well, I never looked it that way. I don't see it as a process that is going to have some ultimate end. I mean the price of freedom, as we all know, is eternal vigilance. Why don't we grasp onto that principle, and understand that it's an eternal process. I never encourage anyone to do more than what they can do in their own little corner of the world. People are thinking globally, and think that they have to act globally. Well that new saying that's come into circulation, "Think Globally, Act Locally", is absolutely true. It works. It gets rid of the anxiety, because the anxiety comes from the feeling that you are over-powered. Do the simplest little thing on the local level and you become empowered. One of the biggest things we do at Freedom Party is to try to help people to understand their potential. I've held many a hand to the altar of this realization which means going to All Candidates Debates with somebody, which means helping them with a speech, which means sitting down at late hours and hacking out ideas with them. The people come to you for this. Over time they discover that, as an individual who chooses to do something, they have more power and more influence than a hundred thousand individuals who chose to watch t.v. every night. And that is absolutely the truth.

The whole business of change, everything that happens, is a minority concern. I had this drummed into my head in a very funny way. One of the early issues we got involved with here at Freedom Party, and this will give you an idea of the politically incorrect issues we're willing to tackle, had to do with the feminist movement. The feminist movement is very, very pronounced and noticeable here in London, because we're a university community. The University of Western Ontario has some very active political groups, and we were quite astounded at their influence on campus. They were receiving [are they still receiving this???] government grants in the hundreds of thousands of dollars on an annual basis. Whenever they issued a statement the media grasped onto it. You had this impression that they were one gigantic group of politically active feminists. Well, as I got involved on the local scene, I eventually discovered to my amazement that all of these movements and groups combined consisted of about eleven or twelve people. They commanded such influence and control over the media because they knew the right people. They were always on the air saying oh, yes, we have a million supporters and we have this and that, and none of that is ever true. None of them ever gets challenged as to the actual level of their support. They can say anything, but when you actually find out who's running everything you always find that it's generally less than twelve people. That's true of Freedom Party, and that's true of huge groups like the National Citizens Coalition which is a large lobby group here in Canada. I've seen it in many American groups. Generally you don't need any more people than that to operate an organization. The rest of it is support. It's not always the same eleven or twelve people. And you don't want more. You can't have too many chiefs. [You don't tell about what you did with the feminist issue, I'm curious!!!]

Q: What can the average citizen do to influence government policy?

Metz: There are numbers of things, and I'm sure we've seen lists of them everything from writing letters to the editor to responding to those newspaper public announcements for school board or municipal input sessions. For example, this month in the city of London alone they're having all kinds of public input sessions at the London School Board and at Municipal Hall over budget issues. So often people just don't show up. Yet you're given 5 or 10 minutes to say something, and your ideas are heard by hundreds of thousands of people. [is this televised?] People always discount that kind of influence because they may get up in front of a crowd, they may give a speech, they may write a letter to the editor, and they feel really great the day it happens or the day they see their letter in the newspaper, and then nothing happens. They're completely unaware of the effect that they have had, because they're not in the right place to see it. Again this is where I've had this amazing front row center seat, because I've been constantly identified with Freedom Party, and I'm always available. For example one day a fellow tells me oh, I saw your letter to the editor in the paper the other day. I'm thinking to myself I didn't have a letter to the editor the other day, and when he starts talking about it I realize he's talking about a letter I wrote in 1986. It's that stuck with him that long. And I might never have known about it. I began to learn this more and more, and as we've started our own publications the reaction we are getting is phenomenal. Essays and articles that I've written have been taken by people and copied or faxed all over North America. Unless you're in the right place to get the information back you'll never find out about it. We really underestimate the power of an editorial page in a newspaper. People cut those things out! They put them up on their bulletin boards! I think there's a cynicism among people who are lobbying for change because they don't know how to recognize it when it happens.

Q: What would you say is the state of ideas in Canada; what are the concepts that Canadians don't understand and that they need educating on?

Metz: Oh, wow, such basic concepts it's frightening. I would go quite frequently speaking to students in classrooms about any issue they might invite me to. And I've noticed a tremendous drop-off in the knowledge of students, even in senior grades in high schools. They are completely unaware of their history, of their background, of the fundamentals of what freedom is all about, of the threats to liberty, of the significance of what they're seeing. It is so basic. There's a tremendous ignorance of basic economic principles, which I think should be taught at the elementary levels, not when you get into college. One of the things that frustrates me is people's ignorance or their lack of understanding of concepts, and that again is a reason why it is such a slow motion process to convert people's ideas. It requires conceptualization upon conceptualization. And that doesn't happen in one sitting.

Q: Do you think that has to start in the universities or can it start on other levels?

Metz: Well it starts with the individual all the time. I could recommend that, yeah, it should start at universities and it should start in government. No, no; it should start with me. And after that it's none of my business. If I can influence enough people, and they influence other people, who knows how many people I'm really influencing. I've never been an elected official, but I have such a degree of influence in this city and southern Ontario that every local politician on every level knows who I am. I have earned respect just because I have taken what I do very seriously, and even though my ideas seem radical, to people I approached at the time, the way I displayed them and the way I carried them out basically gave me credibility.

Q: Well, you know here in the U.S. we just had a major election which it seems to be a fundamental repudiation of continuing socialism.

Metz: I can't tell you how many Canadians are just elated about it.

Q: Do you think that there might be a similar movement in Canada?

Metz: There is such a movement. There is definitely a movement going on, but our political structure isn't allowing the change to happen within the existing party structure. Whereas a lot of what is happening in the U.S. is happening within the Republican Party. There's a lot of changes going on in that party. Unfortunately our three existing parties are pretty rooted in their statist philosophies, but on the federal level we recently had a whole new party come on the scene and that was the Reform Party. They have captured the small c conservative constituency, and virtually wiped the traditional Conservative Party off the map in the last election. The old Conservative Party, which was the majority government under Brian Mulroney, was reduced to two seats in the House. And the Reform Party which was unheard of before has fifty-two seats. Certainly the trend is on. Ontario, unfortunately, is the most statist province in Ontario. Then again that may be the catalyst that makes it one of the quickest in changing to free enterprise.

Q: Let's say the U.S. truly deregulates its markets, and cuts taxes, and becomes an economic dynamo; can Canada's economy last without doing the same?

Metz: No. Regardless of if the U.S. does that or not, it's imperative that Canada deregulates. And until Canada's creditors start saying no, Canada doesn't have any incentive not to do so. It's time Canada's creditors started saying no, for our own good. It may be a bitter pill to swallow, but it's better than the one that's going to come at the end of the tunnel if we don't slow down now. Canada still spends, annually, over thirty billion dollars more than it takes in. And you cannot just do that indefinitely. We're now borrowing money to pay the interest.

Q: What was the Canadian reaction to the North American Trade Agreement?

Metz: It's funny; as always when change is coming there was absolute hysteria against it. Particularly the media and very many left wing groups and lobbyists and people protected by various tariffs and subsidies were doing the loudest screaming. Now that it's been slowly phasing in Canadians are starting to realize that they are benefiting from this deal tremendously. Our exports are better. The Canadian economy has improved, despite everything that's going on at this moment with the drop in the dollar. Basically the reaction was negative in the media, but then again I'm always wary of what I read in the press. We get that sense of what everyone else thinks from a media that's reporting things not really as they are.

Q: They're a small elite making a big splash.

Metz: Absolutely. I've always found a major difference in the opinions of the people I meet on the street with what I hear on the t.v. and read in the papers. But that opinion is generally in line with what you hear on open-line talk shows. If you want to hear the real pulse of the public, listen to an open-line talk show.

Q: So do you think that people were basically for it?

Metz: I think so.

Q: Why?

Metz: Because they're smart enough to recognize that free trade benefits them, that having more options at lower prices frees up other money for other purposes.

Q: Do you personally think it is a good thing?

Metz: Absolutely, free trade is right.

Q: What about the fact that all these various free trade agreements have a board of people to make decisions that will tell each country what to do with their economic policy. That seems to be a criticism, of a lot of libertarians and free market people, against these free trade agreements, because they're not free trade.

Metz: Well, to a great extent they're correct. You can't paint it all with one brush stroke. You have to be very careful what the free trade boards actually are doing. Are they enforcing a contractual agreement, in which case their purpose is legitimized, or are they really enforcing or protecting some nation's interest. To the extent that they do the latter then we have reason to complain. But certainly if you're going to have a free trade agreement you're going to have to establish some sort of a board, some sort of a "government", that both parties agree to arbitrate their disputes through.

Q: Do you think that the board, as it is, is healthy or unhealthy?

Metz: I'm not informed enough specifically about whether saying the board itself is healthy or unhealthy. I think the only way the consumer and citizen can tell is are your prices coming down, are there any problems with people complaining about tariff restrictions or anything like that. Then you know there's a problem, and we've heard of a few of these. Canada and the U.S. have had some disputes over lumber, for example, because Canada can out produce the States in that particular commodity. We just have to hope that the boards, that do adjudicate these disputes, confine themselves to the dispute and stick by the rules. If the rules are kept, everyone will benefit, as long as those rules don't include quotas and things like that.

Q: On another subject, how healthy is the Canadian medical system?

Metz: Well, Canadians will tell you that it's the best system in the world, and they'll tell you that they wouldn't want to live in another country that wouldn't have a system like that. They'll tell you that that may be the reason they live in Canada, and why they wouldn't live in the United States, but Canadians are in the greatest state of denial on this particular issue than anyone could possibly envisage.

Q: Why?

Metz: If you compare our medical system in terms of the service it can deliver, we're far, far worse off in many respects than what is being delivered in the United States. Because of our socialized medical system Canadians are not permitted to pay for their own medical care. Those who are able to pay go to the United States for their care. In Canada Canadians are on waiting lists for serious surgery. MRIs, is one thing you always hear about in Canada, that they're aren't as many MRIs in Canada as there are in one small town in the United States. The Canadian medical system is run by government, and if we extrapolate by experience how government has run other things, why we think we have a great health care system can only be explained in one way, and that is that people define a great health care system to mean that they don't have to pay when they go in the door. If the level of care on the other side of the door approximates their expectation of health care, even though it may not be as good as something they have no knowledge of it, they're quite happy. And that's what they're afraid of losing. The irony is that that is what they will lose if they continue to support the philosophy of socialized medicine.

Q: What keeps you in Canada? What makes you care to not emigrate to the U.S., if the U.S. has better health care, etc?

Metz: Number one the U.S. is right at my doorstep. I can go over there any time I want. I've been to places in the States that I wouldn't be able to tell were any different from Canada. The same applies to a number of other countries. I'm here because my roots are here, because I've invested a lot personally here. I now have a political party which I'm personally involved with, which requires my investment. In a funny sort of way, it's a sort of a paradox; as things get politically worse for Ontario they're better for us, because we get that many more people looking, so we stand to benefit from that. There are a number of factors that keep me here. You have to start in your own backyard, if you're always moving around and changing your backyard, you're not going to have much influence over a long period of time.

Q: What is the most important lesson you've learned from life so far?

Metz: You've got to enjoy what you're doing while you're doing it. I've learned one thing which is never to look at the process of life as a process of obtaining a specific objective. Life itself is the process, going where you're going; you never really get there. I think that's the biggest thing you have to learn.

Q: Can you be satisfied with what you're doing?

Metz: Not necessarily satisfied, but certainly happy with and/or content with it. You have to have some level of dissatisfaction and discomfort in your life in order to stir you on to better things. That's not particularly what I'm referring to; I'm referring more to understanding that the process of what you do is what is life all about. {END}

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Page last updated on February 19, 2006