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Men's Shelter Under Threat! CCMF's Justin Trottier Calls for Help | Fireside Chat 234 · Honey Badger Radio

• 0:00
  Okay, hello everyone, and welcome to Honey Badger Radio. My name is
• 0:04
  Brian. I'm here with the Boss Allison, and today we have a special
• 0:08
  guest, an old friend of the channel's been on a number of times,
• 0:13
  justin Trotier of well, formerly Cafe, but now the Canadian Is it the
• 0:21
  center? Yeah, center for man and Families? I think at the center
• 0:23
  the second part of that wrong, yeah, yeah, so yeah. First
• 0:29
  of all, welcome to the show. Always great to join you back here,
• 0:33
  guys, Thanks for having me on. Yeah. So, so what
• 0:38
  Allison, before we get into it, maybe there's a little bit of backstory
• 0:42
  that we need our us tell us about Cafe now see O goodness, I'm
• 0:48
  terrible with acronyms, c CMF d s c MF yeah, yeah, yeah,
• 0:53
  tell us about that, like, what, what is it, why
• 0:56
  you found it, whatever you think is pertinent to know, because we do
• 0:59
  have some new new viewers who might not even know really what's going on up
• 1:03
  in Canada in terms of men's issues and how we're addressing or there are people
• 1:07
  addressing them in Canada. So go ahead, yeah, I appreciate the opportunity.
• 1:12
  Well, it's the same organization you've always known and hopefully loved. We
• 1:17
  used to go by the name Canadian Association for Equality or CAFE. Now we
• 1:21
  go by Canadian Center for Men and Families or CCMF. You can see a
• 1:23
  really bad at concision. We cannot make coman. We kind of want to
• 1:29
  have to put it all in there. But we've always operated, or for
• 1:33
  most of our existence, we had operated with CCMF as a trade name,
• 1:37
  and once we started opening Canadian Centers for Men and Families, these hubs for
• 1:42
  programming for men, boys, fathers and families, we became more and more
• 1:46
  associated with that name. And then after doing that for several years, and
• 1:51
  people knew us as CCMF, and we're always surprised to find out, well,
• 1:55
  the legal names actually CAFE. We just decided, let's not make things
• 1:59
  anymore. Canus using and complicated and being in this line of work is hard
• 2:02
  enough, so we're going to start simplifying and streamlining things. And so we
• 2:07
  just basically adopted what was a trade name and now it's our legal name,
• 2:10
  Canadian Center for Men and Families. But it's changed absolutely nothing as far as
• 2:15
  our mandate, so we're still in the business of delivering, you know,
• 2:19
  critical frontline social and mental health services for men and boys. We're still operating
• 2:23
  of first of its client shelter, emergency residential facility for fathers and children,
• 2:29
  cleaning violence domestic violence in Toronto with plans to expand to some other parts of
• 2:34
  Canada. And we're still doing research, we're still doing advocacy work, we're
• 2:38
  still doing public education. So functionally, no change, just a simplification and
• 2:42
  a streamlining to make our work a little bit easier. Well, I do
• 2:46
  have to commend you because a lot of organizations that have like have these this
• 2:54
  focus or this interest in dealing with men's issues. I've noticed that over time
• 3:00
  time they actually adopt more gender neutral names, which is really really an interesting
• 3:05
  process that I've seen. So Glenn Cook, that's like a name from wayback.
• 3:08
  He started out I think fathers and families, and then it ended up
• 3:13
  being like more of a family, like just families, like family advocacy.
• 3:19
  So they like I've noticed that sometimes these organizations who do address men's issues start
• 3:24
  to move towards rebranding as gender neutral away from that. And it's interesting that
• 3:30
  you went in the other direction, the other Yeah, yeah, you leaned
• 3:32
  in more, you leaned in more Yeah, No, that's a that's a
• 3:37
  good observation. I think we're trying to be very frankly clear and unapologetic that
• 3:42
  we are in the business of helping some critical life and death issues, service
• 3:49
  gaps, et cetera, for the community of men and boys, and not
• 3:52
  wanting to hide that or kind of play games with what we really are.
• 3:57
  But I'll be honest. I mean, when we pipped and I was the
• 3:59
  one who pipped the cafe name, originally that was the thinking. It was,
• 4:02
  we're going to establish a charity, and this is in the founding documents
• 4:06
  of the charity, which is which is centrist, you know, which is
• 4:11
  about gender equality and we care about men and women equally. We're going to
• 4:15
  focus, however, now on men, men's and boys issues. That was
• 4:17
  also built in from the beginning because that's where the gaps are. That's where
• 4:21
  the biggest in our opinion, gaps are in programs and services for for gender
• 4:27
  for achieving gender equality. It's on boys and men's issues. So we're going
• 4:30
  to try to have our Caken need it too. We're going to call it
• 4:32
  and brand it with equality name, but we're really going to focus on men
• 4:35
  and boys and that worked for a while, but we actually got people more.
• 4:40
  People were saying to us, why don't you just be you know,
• 4:43
  clear and upfront about what you really are focused on. And so our values
• 4:46
  are the same. We still think, you know, men and women should
• 4:48
  be treated equally, and you know, we care equally about you know,
• 4:53
  gender equality as a pursuit for all genders. But again, our focus is
• 4:58
  where we can make the biggest contribution and all these life and death issues that
• 5:00
  affect men and boys, and now the name reflects that reality. Yeah,
• 5:03
  well that's great, So tell us a bit more of your about your overall
• 5:10
  like what you've done, give us a little more detail on the services that
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  you offer. Perhaps sure, sure, Well, I think in Canada it's
• 5:17
  here to say that we are the leading charity in this space. It's not
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  a large it's not a hugely competitive space to operate in, but nevertheless we
• 5:26
  have established a pretty good reputation as a go to resource for men and boys.
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  We operate frontline, frontline agencies that serve the public, and we have
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  a client tele of probably in the thousands of families a year that we're supporting,
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  and that's a mix of men and boys. Is picking up the phone
• 5:46
  and calling us. But increasingly other agencies operating in the social service sector,
• 5:50
  the victim service sector, police, children's aid societies, et cetera, are
• 5:55
  making referrals to us as an indication that across the whole kind of you know,
• 6:00
  the sector of organizations that care about providing frontline support, there is a
• 6:04
  dawning realization of the gaps in programs for men and boys and a willingness to
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  work with an organization that is really focused on men and boys in order to
• 6:15
  close those gaps. So at this point we're a vital community partner with many
• 6:19
  frontline agencies, you know. One example, every week we participate in a
• 6:24
  Toronto Police initiative where leading community agencies come together in the community and deal with
• 6:30
  sort of the most vulnerable, at risk individuals, families and spots spots in
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  the community, you know, where there's crime and that sort of thing,
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  and we're a partner agency on that effort. So that's kind of a sign
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  of, I guess, the coming of age, if you will, of
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  an organization like ours to get an invitation to join that kind of that kind
• 6:51
  of initiative. Two years ago, we opened a shelter well it's probably Canada's
• 6:57
  only, it's certainly Ontario's only residential facility for male identified victims of family violence
• 7:04
  and their dependence. So that's a complicated way of saying, you know,
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  we accept single men, but we also are taking in fathers who are coming
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  in with children of all ages and gender. So this is quite unique because
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  most women shelters that operate in the domestic violence space have a very kind of
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  binary approach where they may let boys in with a mother, let's say,
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  but once that boy becomes a certain age fourteen sixteen is common, he has
• 7:33
  to be moved out and he separated from his family, and if there's still
• 7:36
  a homelessness situation, he goes into his own youth shelter. He separated from
• 7:41
  his family unnecessarily, in my opinion, we're not taking that approach. So
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  we have fathers who come in with adult children, even with grandparents who come
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  in to take care of the children while the dad is out working or looking
• 7:54
  for a job. So it's a much more inclusive, holistic approach to family
• 7:58
  violence prevention and treatment, and not just the residential side, but while their
• 8:03
  residents were also providing them with legal aid, with access to job training with
• 8:07
  obviously counseling and mental health supports. A lot of these families are dealing with
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  complicated, multifaceted needs, so we're doing our best to treat the whole person
• 8:16
  and the whole family. Beyond that, we do legal clinics, fathering,
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  after separation programs we're about to roll out. This is very exciting, our
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  first youth focused initiative for male youth ages fifteen to thirty, looking at filling
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  a critical gap in many Canadian communities were believe it or not, there really
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  isn't anything for a population that is at high risk of both victimization and becoming
• 8:45
  themselves perpetrators is youth. So we're actually doing this in collaboration with a number
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  of police agencies who for years had been bringing these young men, mostly fatherless,
• 8:54
  mostly without male role models, to us saying what can you do with
• 8:58
  these guys? We don't want to have to rest them. Rather, you
• 9:00
  know that the community support, but nobody had a solution. So work with
• 9:03
  the police, we developed a program that's being responsive to that giant need in
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  the community. Mmmm. Well, it's commendable. All of the stuff that
• 9:13
  you're doing to help men and boys and and to fill in the gaps.
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  You know, there's there's not a lot of acknowledgment of the needs of men
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  and boys. It seems like something that people just do not want to talk
• 9:26
  about or consider. So you you, the reason why you're here now is
• 9:33
  because I'm on your mailing list and you sent out a call for help because
• 9:39
  of a particular situation that you find yourself in now, or your community or
• 9:41
  your your agency finds itself in now. So maybe tell us about what that
• 9:48
  is how people can help you all of the I should let Brian say that.
• 9:52
  No, No, it's okay, it's okay. I was going to
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  say too, before you get into that. Oh, okay, is there
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  something Is there a relationship between this you know, uh, I guess challenge
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  you guys have and this also this new thing where you've established a US based
• 10:09
  charity like a five oh one C three and if you and if not,
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  tell us about that too, because I think that's that's super cool Friends of
• 10:18
  Canadian Center for Men and Families exactly. Yeah, No, it's kind of
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  a happy coincidence in a way because one was not initiated by the other.
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  We didn't expect to have these these challenges, which I'll get into in a
• 10:31
  moment, but certainly having the Friends of CCMF in in the States provides for
• 10:35
  the first time and ability for us to raise significant contributions, uh charitable contributions
• 10:41
  from US donors because as a Canadian charity we're not able. Well, we
• 10:45
  can provide them with charity receipts, but unless they happen to have income or
• 10:48
  assets that they declare with the CRA in Canada doesn't do them much good.
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  Now that's now that's changed. This entity in the States is an I r
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  S recognized five oh one C three, which, as I understand it just
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  means it's a charity. I'm learning as I go with how the US charity
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  laws work, and now we can for donations made to that entity in support
• 11:07
  of CCMF in Canada, we can provide IRS recognized charity receipts to US donors.
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  So we anticipate that that could be a significant game changer in terms of
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  boosting boosting support from south of the border. Despite being in Canada, we
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  do a lot of work internationally. We have an international conference, we have
• 11:26
  a podcast, we have a number of supports that we provide really across around
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  the world, but largely it's being taken up by folks in the US.
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  We want to start a group like CCMF in their communities, and we're providing
• 11:39
  material resources for them to do that and to use our best practices because we
• 11:43
  have been successful and we want to share that success with other groups that want
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  to do likewise. So there's a lot of ways whereby a US donor,
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  despite that the money is going to a Canadian entity, it's still benefiting the
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  entire movement. Not to mention think we do that's first of its kind.
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  Well, first of it's kind of the world in many cases, so you
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  can point to that from anywhere as a precedent as an example of what's possible,
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  even if you're in the US or Europe or or anywhere else. Now,
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  the challenges, okay, so we've always had challenges. That's not new.
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  And I remember when we opened the c Center for Men and Families in
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  Toronto way back in twenty fourteen. That was a major accomplishment at the time,
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  raising the money to do that. Now we're operating with a budget that's
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  you know, ten or twenty times, but at the time, there was
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  nothing like that in Canada, a space for men and boys, a home
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  for men and boys. The one we've in twenty fourteen was in Toronto.
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  We would go on to open them in Ottawa and Calgary and Vancouver in many
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  of their places, and there were a number of hit pieces that we were
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  literally hit with right from the get go. And I remember one that was
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  particularly snarky in the Toronto Star, which is a major publication. I think
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  it's got more readership than even the national papers in Canada, and it was
• 12:56
  the kind of piece which you would never see written about women or feminists.
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  It was by a journalists so called Heather Mallick, and I remember she insulted
• 13:07
  me for being thin and not having a girlfriend. I don't know how she
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  would my status, but it was I can you know, I can share
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  the link with your listeners or whatever. It's it's something that I encourage you
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  to read, but just so you have a sense of what we were dealing
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  with. That was one example. There there were others like it. Those
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  were kind of one off and they weren't coordinated as far as we could tell.
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  We of course, kind of infamous or famous for the protests or riots
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  is really what they work as they ended up being violent in some cases against
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  having folks like doctor Warren Ferrell and Paul Nathanson, Catherine Young giving talks at
• 13:43
  UFT and University Toronto and some of the other institutions. Which is really where
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  we kind of cut our teeth as an organization, was these big, splashy
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  public events at the universities, you know, these so called you know,
• 13:54
  free speech spaces. But as I'm sure your listeners are aware, that's very
• 13:58
  questionable. So we were bringing on these, yeah, provocative speakers, but
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  provocative for a point to raise awareness of life and death issue, suicide prevention,
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  family breakup, you know, young men dropping out of society, et
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  cetera. And these were protested, as I said, sometimes violently. There
• 14:13
  were often police responses. These what happens sporadically at different events or as we
• 14:18
  open centers and things like that. What we're seeing now is a much more
• 14:22
  court seemingly a much more coordinated effort across the sector by far more influential and
• 14:28
  powerful figures. So not rabel arousing student leaders, but actual so called mainstream
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  agencies that in some cases are what I call gatekeepers in this space, So
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  organizations that essentially act as representatives for let's say, the violence against women sector.
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  So all of the violence against women agencies and all the VAW shelters will
• 14:50
  be part of provincial coalitional agencies, which if you're not a member, it's
• 14:54
  very hard to get any provincial government funding. And the provinces are mostly what
• 15:00
  funds the social services in Canada. And so what had happened is we had
• 15:05
  been officially declined by a number of these agencies despite making very robust applications and
• 15:11
  then responding to their many questions and back and forth like there was a real
• 15:16
  dialogue. To be fair, at least they seem to consider it seriously,
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  but at the end of the day they declined it. It's not surprising why
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  these are explicitly feminist organizations. When you apply for membership, you have to
• 15:26
  endorse feminism. You literally have to say that you are a feminist and we're
• 15:30
  women serving organization. We would not do that, but we explained why despite
• 15:35
  that, we were still doing something which was the best interests of not only
• 15:37
  men and boys, but also women and girls. And we very much mean
• 15:41
  that. Our understanding of gender based violence is that a lot of this is
• 15:46
  mutual violence. It's intergenerational violence. If we're not intervening regardless of the gender
• 15:50
  of the victim, we're only allowing cycles of violence to perpetuate. We've got
• 15:54
  to get over this gender binary. So we made this case to these you
• 15:56
  know, explicitly feminist organizations, and they, after driving their feet, they
• 16:02
  finally said no, we're not going to bring you into our family. We
• 16:06
  asked them for explanations, they would not even give us a reason. And
• 16:10
  then following that, the government's decliner applications, not surprisingly because again these are
• 16:15
  gatekeeper agencies. If you're not a member, then the government doesn't consider you
• 16:18
  credible. So that's what that was happening provincially. At the same time,
• 16:23
  I can tell you very briefly, at the federal level, we've been in
• 16:27
  conversation with the Ministry for Women in Gender Equality, which despite the name,
• 16:33
  is really just the status of women. Nothing has really changed. They rebranded,
• 16:37
  you know, everybody rebrands, and they had put out the biggest call
• 16:41
  for funding applications, one hundred and fifty million dollars. Nothing like that amount
• 16:45
  had ever been assigned to gender base violence research and services. And we had
• 16:51
  actually had a number of positive conversations with the folks at this ministry because there
• 16:55
  was a glimmer of hope. They actually released a public statement last fall where
• 17:00
  they acknowledged for the first time this is the former Status of Women that the
• 17:03
  statistics on violence against men and boys, which I couldn't believe. So when
• 17:07
  we saw that, we jumped at it. We and a number of our
• 17:10
  academic collaborators had a series of phone calls with some senior people and they encouraged
• 17:15
  us to apply for funding. We knew that this funding call was coming out
• 17:19
  imminently when we finally looked at it, I can read you the exact language
• 17:23
  under the ineligibility criteria, literally said programs for men and boys as victims,
• 17:30
  survivors or perpetrators of violence will not be eligible, so will not even be
• 17:34
  considered. Don't even bother applying. We bothered applying anyway, and it was
• 17:38
  rejected. We just wanted to kind of get that formal stuning rejection letter so
• 17:45
  that might be you know, people might say, well, why even bother
• 17:48
  applying to a Status of Women ministry, Well, because that's where all the
• 17:49
  money is for violence violence programs, so we're not going to not apply.
• 17:55
  We think we have you know a good reason to get some of that money.
• 17:57
  We're not even asking for half of it, even though half the victims
• 18:00
  are mad. We're asking for more than zero, which is how much they
• 18:03
  can't. Yeah, take whatever feminist acknowledge male victimhood is, whatever number that
• 18:08
  is, and say, can we have that? Can we have the ten
• 18:11
  percent? Can we have the fifteen percent? Can we have the five percent?
• 18:15
  No? Not even that, that's no acknowledgment whatsoever, certainly not financial.
• 18:22
  Really really sort of throws a spotlight on where their priorities are. Yeah,
• 18:27
  and just one quick thing, because this is this is just I can't
• 18:32
  not tell you this. The government of candidate is mandated. At anytime any
• 18:36
  federal agency awards funding, it's got to be analyzed through a gender based lens.
• 18:41
  General. Oh my god, maybe there's something like that in the US.
• 18:45
  I would you mean before it's approved kind of a thing, or just
• 18:48
  to see like to get like a kind of a social credit score around it,
• 18:53
  or like, yah, what's the what's the logic you get applications for
• 18:56
  finding through that lens? The fun is that they clearly didn't apply that lens
• 19:02
  when they wrote the eligibility criteria for the call for funding, because if they
• 19:06
  did, they would have acknowledged that men and voice constituted a population of victims.
• 19:11
  Again, maybe not fifty percent, maybe ten or twenty as Alison was
• 19:14
  saying, but not zero, and should be ineligible for funding. Yeah,
• 19:18
  I think they're I think they're most likely fifty percent. That's my belief.
• 19:22
  But feminists will publish statistics where they aren't an insipigant minority, and they still
• 19:26
  won't provide services or funding in relation to the amount that they even recognize that
• 19:34
  you're not even proportionate twenty eighty because that's what the police data shows. And
• 19:40
  that's why I'm really excited that we're working with police, because they're finally kind
• 19:42
  of waking up to the fact that they're policing is part of the problem.
• 19:47
  It's hiding the real numbers, and it's not treating male victims anywhere the same
• 19:51
  as they treat course not with other genders. And in the States, while
• 19:55
  back I was researching this, apparently if I think it might be by precinct,
• 20:00
  but if an area county, I don't know how they divide their policing
• 20:04
  in the States, but if an area of policing, ever deviates from the
• 20:11
  fifteen eighty five rule, then they are investigated for bias against women. So
• 20:18
  it is there is a there's at least a soft pressure to reduce those numbers
• 20:23
  to as low as possible the numbers of male victims, So the male victims
• 20:27
  are actively discriminated by the system. And you just you're right here telling us
• 20:33
  that's exactly what you found out in Canada, that male victims are being discriminated
• 20:37
  by the system. We've got access to what I consider the smoking gun,
• 20:41
  which is these risk assessment tools that police are trained to use when they go
• 20:45
  in a domestic situation. And these are not public documents, by the way.
• 20:51
  We know this only because I'm not sure if an officer made a mistake
• 20:56
  or what. But one of our own clients actually saw this document for him
• 21:00
  and so what and he managed to take a photo of it or something.
• 21:03
  Anyways, it came to my attention, and so there is actually a point
• 21:06
  in filling out this risk assessment score where it literally says is this a case
• 21:11
  of a male on female assault or is it not? And if it is,
• 21:15
  if you check that box, you go through it totally different. You
• 21:18
  know, it's a branching point in how police are then going to you know,
• 21:22
  enforce the law, so they're definitely profiling. It's absolutely gender profiling.
• 21:27
  They police differently. There is the smoking gun. When it's a male on
• 21:32
  female, they deem it higher risk. In spite of the actual statistics and
• 21:36
  its statistics, Candida, it's not me who did these studies. Statistics Canada.
• 21:40
  The government's statistics department says it's fifty to fifty and even says that when
• 21:44
  you look at the effect of domestic violence, you know the severity of it,
• 21:48
  it's still close to fifty to fifty. Yeah, Yes, definitely,
• 21:53
  it's definitely an issue that shouldn't be ignored. And like I said, it
• 21:56
  is, it is. I mean, I've I've seen this bias against male
• 22:02
  victims myself, and I've seen it in policies. But it's it's interesting to
• 22:06
  have that confirmed by somebody who's doing so much good work with male victims of
• 22:11
  all, you know, not just domestic violence, but I assume you also
• 22:15
  deal with male victims of sexual assault and male victims as children and all this
• 22:21
  other stuff. So you do great work. And to have that confirmed that
• 22:25
  a person, you know, who's who's who is so invested in improving the
• 22:29
  community because they focus on men, they're experiencing discrimination. It's just yeah,
• 22:36
  I know that, Like I know that from what I've seen, what I've
• 22:38
  researched. I am not I shouldn't be surprised, but it is still yeah,
• 22:45
  yeah, still just like wow. What's so particularly new now is the
• 22:49
  level of organizing. And we know this through some insiders. We have some
• 22:53
  members of our advisory board who are actually, this is really quite extraordinary.
• 22:57
  They're former members of some of these same agencies that are officially opposing what we're
• 23:03
  doing, but they have kind of these people have retired or they've exited their
• 23:07
  positions and then they joined and became advisors with us. And we have more
• 23:14
  women than men. I'm not kidding you know. I can send you to
• 23:15
  our website more women than men on a special advisory board we created for the
• 23:18
  Family Shelter. These are leading academics leading in some cases violence against women,
• 23:26
  researchers, frontline service providers like managers at different women's organizations, etc. Who
• 23:33
  are advising us. And we've heard it from a couple of them that there
• 23:37
  are meetings. I don't know if they're happening in smoke filled back rooms like
• 23:40
  expectacy, but they are definitely conversations happening about our progress. So it's kind
• 23:45
  of in a way it's flattering and in a way it acknowledges the success we're
• 23:48
  having. And they're looking in particular at what we did in Toronto, because
• 23:51
  Toronto is where we have the one and only shelter for authers and children that
• 23:56
  exists in all of Canadas is ours in Toronto. And they've seen that changing
• 24:00
  things. They've seen that we're now working with the police. They've seen that
• 24:03
  we're now on the verge of potentially getting governments on board for some of this
• 24:07
  work. In Ontario, they're seeing those referrals. They know that we're getting,
• 24:11
  you know, support from hospitals, clinics, child protective services, like
• 24:15
  very established organizations. Things are changing, and I think they're afraid that if
• 24:22
  we can get a toe hold in other provinces, if we can make this
• 24:23
  a national phenomenon, a network of shelters is what I'm after, that that
• 24:30
  will perhaps even threaten their livelihood because remember a lot of these individuals, they
• 24:33
  owe their paychecks to the fact that there is a certain area that isn't being
• 24:37
  questioned, and if money and resources were reallocated a little bit differently, yeah,
• 24:42
  some of them could lose their jobs. And my position is if your
• 24:45
  job is standing in the way of anybody getting the support they need, good
• 24:51
  ribbons to you in this space. And the funny thing is that the frontline
• 24:56
  service providers, even in the women's organizations, are some of ours longest champions.
• 25:00
  It's all at the bureaucratic level, at the level of the CEO's much
• 25:03
  more disengaged from you know, what's actually happening on the ground. In the
• 25:07
  same agency, we've had like frontline people who call us up, make referrals,
• 25:12
  want to partner with us. Then the CEO finds out that they've been
• 25:15
  in touch with the likes of CCMF and we never hear from that agency.
• 25:18
  Again, the total disconnect at different levels of the same organizations, it's actually
• 25:22
  kind of fascinating. Well, you'd imagine that the frontline workers are more interested
• 25:26
  in actually ameliorating I hope I said that word right, the suffering. But
• 25:30
  it's astounding to me because when you just decode what you're saying, these individuals
• 25:36
  are okay with human suffering as long as they keep getting their paycheck. There
• 25:41
  are because and I think one of the reasons why they're likely opposing what you're
• 25:47
  doing is you are seeing results. And if you do see successes in reducing
• 25:52
  violence, reducing the rate the cycle of violence, then the overall well,
• 25:59
  first of all, it challenged just their their interventions, because their interventions are
• 26:03
  not successful as far as I can tell, I've seen I've seen research done
• 26:08
  on feminist interventions to domestic violence and pointing out and looking at their success rate
• 26:15
  and finding that it they don't have a success rate. So if you are
• 26:19
  seeing success, then you're proving that their interventions are not only you know,
• 26:25
  ideologically motivated, but they're not making the gains that they should be. So
• 26:30
  it's it's it's you can see and it's not even you don't even look at
• 26:33
  it in terms of, oh they dislike men, Oh they just don't want
• 26:38
  to lose their relatively cushy, bureaucratic job. Yeah. And it's and you
• 26:45
  know, that's it's really hard to convince somebody of something that they have to
• 26:51
  to to argue something somebody out of a position that they hold and their paycheck
• 26:56
  is contingent upon them holding it. Yeah, like their identities and their identities.
• 27:02
  Yeah, those two things together are a potent combination. And no,
• 27:04
  you're exactly right. There was actually back in maybe I was twenty seventeen or
• 27:07
  eighteen now, there was a research report that was released by a number of
• 27:12
  organizations in the Alberta women sector, including frontline service providers women shelters, and
• 27:18
  it basically called into question the whole model for family violence shelters and supports for
• 27:25
  women and girls and exactly what you're saying, Alison. They looked at the
• 27:27
  actual data and they found that it had made no difference in terms of preventing
• 27:32
  violence and in fact the actual usage when they looked at there had been a
• 27:37
  report I think just before that that looked at why people are homeless, why
• 27:41
  they need shelters, and it was a very small fraction even of women who
• 27:45
  are actually needing it for family violence reasons. It was many other things,
• 27:48
  and so that led to a rethinking of whether the model was working even for
• 27:55
  women and girls. This report really asked for maybe a innovative rethinking of how
• 28:00
  shelters and other homelessness support services are being provided. It also mentioned men and
• 28:06
  boys. It said, look if we're going to do a wholesale reimagining of
• 28:08
  the sector. We got to also acknowledge the missing groups. So it talked
• 28:11
  about men and boys, I could believe that. And it talked about the
• 28:15
  LGBT community, which again another area nobody talks about. Violence Native is at
• 28:19
  least as high and in some studies higher, and again that's not consistent with
• 28:23
  the narrative, so we don't hear that very much as well. And in
• 28:27
  Alberta, for whatever reason, is where you're going to find a number of
• 28:32
  women's shelters that for years now, maybe ten years or so, have been
• 28:34
  actually admitting fathers and children, which is staggering. I mean for people who
• 28:40
  you know, think about this as gender binary to hear that there are some
• 28:44
  good agencies in that sector who are putting their necks out there frankly because they're
• 28:48
  not winning over a lot of friends, you know, from within their own
• 28:53
  sector when they do that kind of thing. Yeah, generally women's shelters exclude
• 28:59
  men usually, so that is that is really interesting. So these so you
• 29:03
  at these roadblocks. I have two things about this. Two questions that I
• 29:08
  have. One is, what are do you think the potential consequences if these
• 29:17
  these issues are not like you know, there's no way to work around them
• 29:21
  or through them. What do you like, in what way is this going
• 29:23
  to harm your goals? You say, well, I mean, obviously we'd
• 29:30
  prefer to have these agencies on board, and it would make our job a
• 29:33
  lot easier and it would make it much more sustainable. What we're trying to
• 29:37
  do are, as far as I'm aware, no examples of privately run organizations
• 29:45
  doing the kinds of things we do adding the residential component into the support services,
• 29:52
  because operating a residential facility is extremely expensive and extremely risky, and I
• 29:56
  don't know any that do it without getting government is as a core funder,
• 30:00
  as like a core operations under contract funder where the bulk of their annual budget
• 30:06
  is paid for by the government. That is, to facto how virtually all
• 30:10
  of the entities do it. We're struggling to be able. We struggle to
• 30:14
  get the Toronto Shelter opened. We did it entirely with private support, both
• 30:18
  financing and funding, and we were hoping to kind of leverage that to both
• 30:22
  get Ontario governments government agencies on board because that's where we're located, and so
• 30:27
  that proof of concept to provincial governments. We're still working on that. There
• 30:33
  are a number of government agencies we haven't gotten rejection letters from yet, but
• 30:37
  it's proving to be very, very difficult and so likely it looks like we're
• 30:42
  going to have to go the private funding route for Shelters two and three.
• 30:47
  Our eyes are on Alberta and BC. We want to be a try provincial
• 30:51
  organization with a network of at least three facilities in three provinces. And the
• 30:56
  reason to want to have a footprint in three provinces is probably obvious because and
• 31:00
  we have much more funding opportunities. We've got three friends. You know,
• 31:03
  the likelihood of getting at least one of these provinces to finally get on board
• 31:07
  than if we're only focused on Ontario or any particular province. But to get
• 31:11
  that with the opposition we're facing, and the opposition is there precisely to stop
• 31:17
  us from getting that, we're going to have to do it through private support.
• 31:21
  We're going to continue with government, and if we're able to open Shelters
• 31:23
  two and three privately, we're going to go back to government, as we're
• 31:26
  doing in Toronto. In Toronto, we did go to government first, and
• 31:29
  they said no, said okay, we'll do it anyway, and we did.
• 31:33
  And now we've got two two and a half years, one hundred and
• 31:34
  fifty families have passed or passed in and out of our doors. It's an
• 31:40
  amazing track record. We've got those families who taught. Many of them are
• 31:44
  willing to talk about the healing that they benefited from while they were residents with
• 31:48
  us. That changes everything, and that's why we're opening those doors with Toronto
• 31:53
  Police, with the hospitals, with even some government agencies at the city and
• 31:57
  provincial levels in Ontario. That's what these agencies fear in these other provinces,
• 32:01
  and that's why we got to get into those provinces. So to cut to
• 32:05
  the chase, we've got a fundraising campaign a quarter of a million dollars,
• 32:08
  more than far more than we've ever sought to raise in the past. A
• 32:12
  consortium of donors have pledged to match that because they care deeply about jolting us
• 32:17
  to success. It's going to take a bit of a jolt to get over
• 32:21
  the finish line. We still have quite a bit of territory to make up
• 32:25
  on. So this month being Men's Health Month, we are and also Family
• 32:30
  Violence Month. We are quadrupling money that comes in, so every dollar that
• 32:36
  a donor provides will be matched times three by this pool of matching donors,
• 32:43
  and through to the end of the year we'll continue with a one to one
• 32:45
  match. So we're really hoping, you know, to get as close as
• 32:49
  we can to that quarter million match by the end of the year and then
• 32:52
  look at early twenty twenty four from moving ahead with albert NBC. We're not
• 32:58
  sure where we'll go first on the opportunities, but yeah, in the next
• 33:01
  i'd say two to three years, we're definitely looking at going from being a
• 33:05
  one shelter outfit to being a tri provincial network of shelters. And I should
• 33:10
  emphasize as shelters are also headquarters for a broad array of support services. We
• 33:15
  don't only do domestic violence services out of there. There's also an array of
• 33:19
  public programs. I mentioned them, fothering programs, legal clinics, Survivors of
• 33:22
  False Allegations is an important program that we've been running very popular the last couple
• 33:28
  of years. So all of these will have additional homes in other parts of
• 33:31
  the country. Okay, wow, wow, that's incredible. It is so
• 33:37
  can I a question before? Yeah, yeah, yeah, go go ahead.
• 33:39
  Have you considered Saskatchewan. There's nobody there, Allison there eventually. Yeah,
• 33:51
  we're hitting the major population centers first, so I'm afraid we we flew
• 33:57
  over Saskatchewan could be everywhere. I have folks in the Maritimes who are also
• 34:02
  com back wagging their fingers at me, and yeah, all I can say
• 34:07
  is we'll get there in time. But we have to do one thing at
• 34:12
  a time. Yeah. Well, you know, even for people who aren't
• 34:15
  necessarily needing these kinds of services. To be able to start to I'm going
• 34:22
  to take this from another angle to be able to start to challenge the ideological
• 34:28
  stranglehold on how we view men and women. I mean, that's even that
• 34:34
  angle is really critical to start pushing this kind of thing, because we need
• 34:37
  to have a more compassionate, more positive view of the relationship between men and
• 34:45
  women than men oppress women and women are their victims, and that I think
• 34:50
  that's really doing something very negative to our society. And being able to recognize
• 34:57
  that men also face significant challenge lenges and that they are being you know,
• 35:01
  they're also discriminated against in ways, you know, there are certain things that
• 35:07
  women face, there are other things that men face. Being able to recognize
• 35:09
  that goes, I think, a long way to healing this divide that has
• 35:15
  been created by this ideology between men and women. It's yeah, and that's
• 35:22
  why a big focus for us has always been is building alliances with women's organizations,
• 35:27
  and whether it's the advisory board that brings on senior women from these organizations
• 35:31
  literally onto a board that we're we're administering, or whether it's actual initiatives that
• 35:37
  are collaborative in nature. We've done some like co drafting of funding requests to
• 35:42
  do like suicide prevention programs with women's groups. We're all about collaboration, but
• 35:47
  we have to be met halfway, you know, and very often when we
• 35:51
  reach out for collaboration, we're it's there's no response or the response is just
• 35:55
  not it's just not positive. So yeah, there's a big idea loge gap
• 36:00
  that needs to be bridged. I would love it if in time we had
• 36:05
  regular dialogues with UH, with women's organizations, feminies organization, even if they
• 36:09
  don't start by thinking they have much in common with us at all, just
• 36:14
  talking to each other in some kind of like official forum. I've been,
• 36:17
  you know, kind of chewing on that as a project for a while now,
• 36:21
  except that I don't know who to go to on the other side to
• 36:23
  initiate that. Be careful because I went to a I went to a panel
• 36:30
  discussion I've never heard this story at the Calgary Expo and they said, why
• 36:37
  can't we have this discussion? And I said, sure, we can have
• 36:42
  this discussion. I'm a men's rights activist. Let's have this discussion. And
• 36:45
  then the next day I was kicked out. Be careful, be when you
• 36:47
  get invited to have these discussions, because they don't really want when they talk
• 36:53
  about engaging men and boys, but that's just cool. It's just doctrinating men
• 36:58
  and boys in or just telling yeah, yeah, I want to hear menaboids
• 37:02
  actually have to say, because it might be offside the beliefs about what should
• 37:08
  have to say or or should be the role that they should be playing in
• 37:13
  this whole grand I don't know stage play that they've constructed. Okay, I'm
• 37:20
  sorry, So no, it's okay. So so no, it's okay,
• 37:22
  it's okay. So the obstacle we're looking at then is essentially you're not getting
• 37:27
  the support, whether it's financial or even just like you know, something that
• 37:31
  widens the conversation, like if they're they're just like, oh, these people
• 37:37
  want to work with men, let's help them work with men whatever, and
• 37:40
  and and maybe like promote them or whatever, so people will help them out.
• 37:45
  Like it's the obstacle seems to be one primarily of funding, but not
• 37:50
  exclusively, right Is that is that fair? Like support from the public institutions,
• 37:54
  these public entities, these government entities, and so what I was wondering
• 38:00
  is the workaround is just like it was in Toronto. By the way,
• 38:04
  I was at the Toronto Shelter once, like when Warren Farrell was speaking on
• 38:08
  the boy crisis. I don't know if you remember Allison moved. Why did
• 38:14
  you move? I'm putting you back, okay. And anyway, so I
• 38:17
  went to the and I saw the place and it was it was nice.
• 38:21
  There were you know, people working there and stuff. Is it the same
• 38:23
  Do you guys still have the same location. Is it the same place?
• 38:25
  The old office? Yeah? Oh the old office? Yeah yeah yeah.
• 38:29
  I had a fairly small, like a thousand square feet maybe not even office
• 38:32
  that we operated as the Canadian Center for men and families. That's that was
• 38:36
  the one in Toronto, actually the smallest of all the offices. When we
• 38:38
  opened centers in Outawa on Caligrat Center, they were they were quite a bit
• 38:43
  bigger, and those were those weren't residential, so those were just commercial spaces
• 38:46
  where they operated frontline services, you know, in many cases the only kind
• 38:52
  available for men and boys in those communities, the shelters a whole other thing.
• 38:55
  We've we moved to a house, to a very large house in northern
• 38:59
  Toronto near York University. We have a partnership with York that provides a number
• 39:04
  of interns to provide essentially administrative support, residential counseling, intake, et cetera.
• 39:10
  So it's been a very good relationship with university. And it's a house
• 39:15
  that can hold as many as twenty four people, ten bedrooms of varying sizes,
• 39:21
  so everything from a single man to a man with maybe three kids.
• 39:23
  That's really pushing it. But yeah, it's a pretty significant operation in terms
• 39:29
  of its physical infrastructure. Yeah, quite different from the office, and that's
• 39:32
  what we want. We do have these small centers in these other locations,
• 39:36
  but they can only do so much and they don't have the possibility of offering
• 39:40
  emergency residential supports, right, So you've expanded then quite a bit since since
• 39:45
  then, and also with even you know, despite all of these sort of
• 39:51
  obstacles, these financial obstacles, ideological obstacles and so on. So I guess
• 39:55
  the reason why I brought up the US Friends of Canadian Center for Men and
• 40:02
  Families it would seem I guess, like you said, it's sort of like,
• 40:07
  you know, a happy coincidence, because you're not getting the help you
• 40:12
  need from or at least, you know, not to a satisfactory degree,
• 40:15
  from these public institutions, and you have other organizations apparently working to oppose you
• 40:21
  or standing your way or block you, and yet you can, you know,
• 40:24
  because you might have to do this privately across the board. Is that
• 40:29
  is that like the where it looks like things are headed right now? Or
• 40:32
  do you think there's another way around this? I think for now, we've
• 40:37
  always taken in all of the above strategy, so we're never closing the door
• 40:42
  on anything. And the fact that a number of provincial ministries have said no,
• 40:46
  we take that to me, not right now, and we will go
• 40:50
  back with because when they say no, they give a bunch of excuses,
• 40:52
  and we're going to respond to those excuses, and in some cases doing that
• 40:55
  requires us to shore up some research or to create a new alliances partners to
• 41:00
  come back with. So it's not like we can just immediately respond. It's
• 41:05
  sometimes more complicated than that. But eventually we will get back to any agency
• 41:08
  that says no. But I think the thing that's going to be the biggest
• 41:12
  game changer is actually having an operation. So that's a catch twenty two,
• 41:15
  right, how do you do that when you don't have the funding? And
• 41:16
  we found a solution in Toronto. It was private and that wasn't easy,
• 41:22
  but we managed to clubble together enough private capital from individuals, from foundations,
• 41:29
  plus a number of people did a private financing loan, so we had enough
• 41:34
  to buy a large house and we also have enough to operate it. It's
• 41:38
  not just the capital. You also have to be able to afford staffing and
• 41:42
  operational costs. That's not a small amount for an expensive operation like this.
• 41:47
  So we've managed to sustain it, you know, since we opened to three
• 41:50
  years ago. So I do think if we're going to get this thing moving
• 41:54
  anytime in the next couple of years that and I don't anticipate you know,
• 42:00
  thing happening that's going to change the landscape. I can't be confident that any
• 42:07
  government agencies are going to get on board. It just doesn't look like they're
• 42:08
  writing's on the wall. But we do have the opportunity from the private donor
• 42:15
  class. So we've got to match the quarter million dollars, which those donors
• 42:19
  are eager to give that money, but they're also wanting to catalyze, you
• 42:22
  know, a sizable amount of additional donors. They want to be obviously part
• 42:28
  of a larger pool. So we're really hoping that we can match that,
• 42:31
  and that would be half a million dollars. It's not just that we've got
• 42:35
  a number of major public and pride government sorry family foundations that have been supporting
• 42:39
  us for the last number of years because we have the Toronto Shelter. Again,
• 42:43
  we wouldn't have that funding if we didn't have it, and they are
• 42:45
  already stepping up to make commitments to expanding shelters in albert And as I've described.
• 42:52
  So we're putting the pieces in place on both the capital and the operation
• 42:55
  side, but it's essential that we do match this quarter million other pieces aren't
• 43:00
  enough. We have to be successful with that. That's that's obviously a large
• 43:04
  gap that has to be closed, and we're doing everything we can to kind
• 43:07
  of incentivize people to uh to give you know, as I said in November,
• 43:10
  it's quadrupled and throughout the whole year, it's it's going to be uh
• 43:15
  doubled or if not quadrupled, that's great. Uh. And are like,
• 43:19
  if if you're listening to this, well, I hope because we you know,
• 43:22
  we do have an audience, I hope you guys are listening to this.
• 43:24
  They are, please do help out because this is really critical. And
• 43:29
  again it's not just and it's critical enough that you are helping men in need,
• 43:34
  but it also is, you know, a step forward to challenging the
• 43:38
  orthodoxy, you know, the cathedral. Like it's a step forward to challenging
• 43:43
  one of their their big I'll take this a little bit further, one of
• 43:47
  their big weapons that they use in order to shut down certain discourse, which
• 43:52
  is this idea that it that women are universal victims of everything, and so
• 43:59
  the that that angle is really important as well. We need to recognize that
• 44:04
  men suffer significantly from domestic violence, they suffer significantly from sexual violence, and
• 44:08
  those two, those two problems are being used to support a narrative that men
• 44:16
  essentially use society to oppress women, and that narrative is often used to silence
• 44:22
  people, to exclude people, to construct these these negative feedback spirals where you
• 44:30
  know, you end up with the community and then the community gets infected by
• 44:32
  this and it just turns into a wasteland with with people trying to throw each
• 44:37
  other out of it. You know, I know this is this is this
• 44:39
  is far from necessarily your your your wheelhouse. But I'm talking more to the
• 44:44
  people who who who regularly tune into our content and what we talk about,
• 44:49
  so the kind of things that they've concerned about. So it's all tied together.
• 44:53
  And one of the first places, one of the biggest battlegrounds is getting
• 44:58
  them to recognize that men and boys are victims of these two social ills that
• 45:04
  they have co opted to their narrative in order to adjusify a lot of their
• 45:08
  a lot of their political clout. Okay, sorry, go ahead, no,
• 45:12
  I was going to just jump on that because I'm really glad you made
• 45:15
  that point. The reason why we're so preoccupied with this issue of victimization is
• 45:19
  it really is at the core of everything. Just along the lines of what
• 45:22
  you're saying, There was an effort to reform the Divorce Act in Canada.
• 45:29
  There was actually and it was there were changes they did. The federal government
• 45:34
  actually put in an amendment. We were not successful though, at making equal
• 45:37
  parenting a rebuttable presumption of equal parenting one of our flagship policy initiatives. Part
• 45:43
  of it, and the reason was family violence, because the main counterpoint by
• 45:47
  feminist groups is fathers don't really care about their children. There's not really such
• 45:52
  a thing as parental alienation. It's really just a way for them to maintain
• 45:57
  control, to continue to victimize women until we finally crack the nut of this
• 46:01
  this ideologic, this false data, unsupported ideology about family violence and gender and
• 46:08
  victimization generally, this is always going to be a thorn in the side of
• 46:13
  any legislative efforts around family law reform, which I know is very important to
• 46:17
  you know your listeners, and it's just as important to center for men and
• 46:21
  families. That's a key that's another key area for us, even suicide prevention.
• 46:25
  We're very active in suicide prevention. Men or three quarters of all suicides
• 46:30
  in Canada. It's probably no different in the US and many other parts of
• 46:32
  the world. And even there they don't They may acknowledge the statistics, but
• 46:37
  they don't want to acknowledge men as a vulnerable community meeting, you know,
• 46:40
  a dedicated prevention strategy because there's they're not victims in the same way as women.
• 46:45
  Well that's a bizarre connection, but it's still you is to try to
• 46:50
  suggest that men and boy is basically men and boy's own fault, Like if
• 46:52
  they're gonna, you know, kill themselves, they should just learn to you
• 46:58
  know, not do it or something one thing. I don't know, I'm
• 47:00
  trying to do that. But they cannot see men voids as anything other than
• 47:05
  you know, perpetrators and the cause of all societies eels, rather than a
• 47:08
  vulnerable, sometimes victimized group. And it does then in the way of everything
• 47:13
  from suicide prevention, equal share of parenting, any of our work around male
• 47:19
  youth. It's always again and again, you know what people go to as
• 47:22
  an excuse for not budgeing. We were actually co producers of Erasing Family,
• 47:30
  the documentary that came out in twenty nineteen. Oh, yeah, we watched
• 47:32
  that. Yeah, example of our international footprint. And yeah, if you
• 47:37
  watch that documentary, you can see quite clearly how there's an intimate connection between
• 47:42
  those issues, family violence and efforts to stall equal parenting reform. And honestly,
• 47:49
  these are they are actually throwing under the bus female victims because the female
• 47:54
  victims are a minority group in parental alienation. They actually the feminist groups.
• 48:00
  When I say they, I meant the feminine if you mean the feminist groups
• 48:02
  on Twitter, they've actually tried to rebrand it to something to do with women
• 48:07
  coercively removed from their children's lives instead of parental alienation. So they're trying to
• 48:14
  just make it parental alienation, but not with the men who are victims of
• 48:19
  it. And it's it's just interesting to see and the this entire framework,
• 48:25
  the domestic violence and also the sexual violence framework. It it is extremely lucrative,
• 48:34
  I'm gonna say that. And this is this is something that I have
• 48:37
  researched myself. After the Johnny Depp amber Heard trial, and there was something
• 48:43
  that one of the people who are who was like a a president of one
• 48:51
  I think it was the Network Against Domestic Violence National Network Against Domestic Violence in
• 48:57
  the States, she did an interview and she said that the Johnny Depp amber
• 49:04
  Herd case was not very good for her organization because it didn't bring in any
• 49:08
  money, and I'm like, wow, you're just gonna slap that out there
• 49:16
  plainly. But then I looked at the financials of these institutions, these organizations.
• 49:21
  I'm not talking about Canada necessarily, but the States, and you're looking
• 49:24
  at million dollar organizations and they are getting in millions and millions of dollars they're
• 49:31
  paying out, and then the salaries seem modest until you look at the amount
• 49:37
  of work that they're doing. So you'll have i don't know, twelve board
• 49:40
  members each getting about forty thousand a year, and they're doing half an hour
• 49:46
  to an hour's work of week of work a week. And then then I
• 49:52
  follow these names and I discovered that they're on multiple boards of multiple organizations,
• 49:58
  and that forty thousand dollars a year starts to really add up when you're on
• 50:02
  ten organizations doing one hour week week to each of them, and I'm like,
• 50:07
  this is this is insane. And the and the and they the services
• 50:10
  that they offer, We're talking like I was looking at the budget for the
• 50:15
  actual services. The actual services you'd look at like a five million dollars a
• 50:20
  year uh an NGO, and the services that they're offering are like maybe one
• 50:27
  hundred thousand dollars a year. And they're like and they and they still and
• 50:31
  they still supposedly can operate under the auspices of being a genuine like charitable organization.
• 50:40
  And I'm like, how can you and and the and the and the
• 50:45
  way that they do that is, of course the board board members. They're
• 50:50
  somehow they they've jiggered it so that all of this money going out to the
• 50:53
  board members is considered part of the operating expenses of their chair aritable organization.
• 51:00
  And I'm like, how I mean? And I looked at all of the
• 51:04
  rules and are some of the rules that that they have in the States,
• 51:07
  and it's all all abides by the rules. But if you look at it,
• 51:10
  it's this nest, this like slash of money, this waterfall of money
• 51:15
  going through this issue. And it's because and I wanted to bring this up,
• 51:20
  and I'm sorry if I'm talking too much. One of I think there
• 51:24
  was an event that was put on by we knew her farren Meyer and about
• 51:32
  these the negative sum game. And what I've discovered is that when you know,
• 51:40
  if you have an issue that we perceive harms women, and people are
• 51:49
  donating to try to protect or try to protect women, and you have like
• 51:52
  a hundred female victims, if somebody says, but wait, there are also
• 51:57
  one hundred male victims, we need to help them too, people will stop
• 52:01
  donating period. Like even if there's twice as many victims but half of them
• 52:07
  are male, They're like, wow, this problem isn't you know, we
• 52:08
  don't need to worry about it now. Yeah, it's also victims. Yeah,
• 52:13
  It's almost like it has to be exclusively female, conclusively female, in
• 52:16
  order for people to feel like compelled to donate or help. And the reason
• 52:21
  why I sort of came to this conclusion is though I was looking at this
• 52:24
  information from a man in the Congo who was working with rape victims, and
• 52:32
  he had found that there was a significant number of men who are coming to
• 52:37
  him for help with the aftermath of being raped and it was horrific like physical
• 52:42
  injuries. But his donor, which I believe was Duck's Dutch ox Dam,
• 52:46
  came to him and said if the number of men that he helps ever exceeds
• 52:52
  thirty percent of his total the total people he helps, they're going to reank
• 52:55
  his funding, which means that they would take the funding of way way from
• 53:00
  the women he helps too, which just freaking astounded me, and it made
• 53:05
  me realize that this is this is more than helping people, and it's more
• 53:09
  than even helping women. It's maintaining a particular ideological framework to see reality through.
• 53:16
  So if you if you create something that helps eighty women and twenty men,
• 53:22
  they will say, well, if you increase that to over like,
• 53:25
  you know, thirty women and seventy or sorry, seventy women and thirty men,
• 53:30
  will take away your funding for everyone. I mean that means that what's
• 53:32
  driving it isn't even concerned for women, Yeah, because you're you're destroying them
• 53:37
  too. Well, now just astounds me. So in Canada, there is
• 53:42
  a lot of money being put into homelessness, as there should be, but
• 53:45
  the federal government is mandating that at least that no less than twenty five percent
• 53:51
  of new subsidized housing candidate, but at least twenty five percent new subsidized housing
• 53:57
  projects have to be for women led families. So rather than making poverty the
• 54:02
  litmus test for eligibility, it's gender, which I don't understand. I mean,
• 54:07
  if women and it's probably the case that there are more female lead households,
• 54:14
  single mother led households that fall below the poverty line. But if that's
• 54:17
  true, then if you make poverty the litmus test, then you will inevitably
• 54:22
  provide more housing to women. Right. But are you saying that you're going
• 54:27
  to choose better off women over lower income mand if it comes to it,
• 54:31
  or you're going to, as you said, pull the funding entirely from a
• 54:34
  project if it ever kind of dips below that seventy five twenty five percent.
• 54:37
  But I mean to your point, like, psychologically, this is what we're
• 54:42
  up against that it is always the case that people will open doors for funding
• 54:46
  for women and girls and they will close them in your face. Sometimes literally.
• 54:51
  I've had that experience when you talk about also, let's do it for
• 54:53
  men and boys. It's a totally different, you know, starting point that
• 55:00
  you're always having in my line of work to make the case to be fearful
• 55:04
  about who's going to be listening, because God forbid, they're one of your
• 55:07
  strongest opponents and only will they deny your application, but if your application includes
• 55:13
  mention of some of your partners, they're going to call those partners and bully
• 55:15
  them to no longer partner with you. You've had that happen a few times
• 55:20
  too. Actually, I don't know if I get into the weeds on this,
• 55:22
  but there was one situation where one of our key advisors, a woman
• 55:28
  who runs an organization that supports shelters in the g in the Greater Toronto area.
• 55:35
  She had been one of our strongest champions from the beginning, and she
• 55:38
  had to remove her support, like formally resign her involvement because she got a
• 55:45
  call one day from an individual that runs a women's shelter in that same region
• 55:51
  of Canada. And this woman is also very close to the Ministry of Community
• 55:57
  Services, which is the ministry that funds all this stuff up, and basically
• 56:00
  threatened to make her funding go away if she stayed connected to us. My
• 56:06
  god, this is this is what we're up again. This is why I
• 56:08
  say we need your help, Like people who are listening to this, we
• 56:13
  cannot, you know, do this without that. And that's that's been our
• 56:15
  secret. It's not much of a secret, it's and the thousands of individual
• 56:20
  donors who are so you know, frustrated and angered, and they should be
• 56:24
  by these kinds of roadblocks, by the fact that ideology is getting in the
• 56:29
  way of helping real people, including women and you know, women and girls
• 56:32
  in some instances. That's what happens if I'm going to step up and make
• 56:36
  this happen. That's what absolutely floored me when I was looking at those financials.
• 56:39
  I'm like, this has nothing to do with helping women and girls.
• 56:43
  This has to do with making bank on the suffering of women and girls.
• 56:47
  You know, when I started all this, I went into men's issues because
• 56:52
  I saw them as being neglected. And then at the end, like you
• 56:55
  know, like to realize now that the real and why a lot of these
• 57:00
  people even pay attention to the issues of women and girls is simply because they
• 57:05
  open people's wallets. So now I'm in a position where they are literally using
• 57:13
  women and girls as livestock and they're not addressing these issues in a way that
• 57:20
  reduces the suffering. And I actually also researched some of the stuff that was
• 57:25
  going on with sexual sexual court like sexual abuse in the eighties and nineties.
• 57:32
  Actually of the eighties, I think because it was interesting because my husband does
• 57:37
  a lot of recording of radio broadcasts, and in the late nineties they had
• 57:42
  this broadcast about this initiative to give therapy to at risk boys, so boys
• 57:49
  who are at risk at sexual offending. So these were themselves sexually abused boys,
• 57:52
  and the broadcast was so it was like you could take it and you
• 58:00
  could have repeated the concepts on one of our podcasts and they would have been
• 58:04
  labeled as men's issues. And this was considered to be an initiative that was
• 58:09
  supported by the police, it was supported by the institutions of the time,
• 58:14
  and it simply acknowledged that these boys had been abused and that was why they
• 58:17
  were at risk, and acknowledged what they were going to do to help them
• 58:22
  overcome what had happened. And I was listening to this and I'm like,
• 58:24
  these initiatives existed then, and then they disappeared. Where did they go?
• 58:30
  So I started looking into the progression in the academic sphere around sexual abused and
• 58:39
  violence, and I saw a paper written by feminists who said who were actually
• 58:47
  having a discussion, And I found it astounding that they were occupying this gatekeeping
• 58:52
  role. They were having a discussion about psychological interventions into reducing the rate of
• 58:59
  of predation in men and at risk groups of men, not men in general,
• 59:05
  not oh, they're all contributing to a rape culture, but actually identifying
• 59:09
  the at risk groups of youth and young men and having psychological interventions that were
• 59:15
  proving to have an effect on reducing their rate of offending. And they were
• 59:22
  discussing whether or not to oppose that because it defied their ideological framework. So
• 59:30
  I'm looking at this discussion where feminists are like, well and let's let's bring
• 59:35
  it down to brass tacks. Well, we could stop women being raped,
• 59:39
  but that would you know, that would we can our position as feminists.
• 59:44
  I'm like, what I mean, that's the that behavior is insane and it's
• 59:52
  so ideologically driven. And I you know, I heard this from people like
• 59:58
  Aaron Pizzy that a lot of this was was not just ideologically driven, but
• 1:00:01
  driven through money, and I was just like, I couldn't believe that anybody
• 1:00:05
  would engage in that level of perfidity. And then I read this and I'm
• 1:00:08
  like, oh my god, and ultimately like this this level of inability to
• 1:00:17
  recognize the legitimacy of male victimhood is leading to interventions that ensure that more more
• 1:00:24
  women are victimized. And because of the cycle and the fact that we aren't
• 1:00:30
  we now we're focusing on rape jokes, which has absolutely no evidence that that
• 1:00:35
  there's some clear of causal factor to engage, you know, for sexual violence,
• 1:00:39
  instead of these kinds of psychological interventions which were shown to have an effect.
• 1:00:46
  And it just it just sort of floored me. I apologize, I
• 1:00:50
  went on a little bit of a rant there, so I will star the
• 1:00:52
  histories fascinating and uh, well, in a way, it gives me hope
• 1:00:58
  that there once was a time when maybe there was more of an ability to
• 1:01:01
  operate in the space. But it also is kind of a cautionary tale because
• 1:01:05
  it looks like that was taken away by a group of you know, radicals
• 1:01:10
  who came together to oppose it, and that's kind of what we're facing now.
• 1:01:14
  So hopefully we kind of learn our lessons. But I was going to
• 1:01:16
  say, you know, the causality issue, it's staring them in the face,
• 1:01:22
  like where would a if a girl is at risk is actually being victimized
• 1:01:28
  by a mother, or is at risk of being victimized. What happens because
• 1:01:32
  if the dad calls for help, the dad's probably separated and taken out of
• 1:01:37
  the family. There is no place for the dad to go with the girl.
• 1:01:40
  So it's always been staring them in the face, this giant hole in
• 1:01:44
  services for abused women and girls. They just could not make the connection to
• 1:01:49
  see that sometimes the girl is being victimized by another female, her mother,
• 1:01:53
  right, And because of that, to me obvious glaring gap, we've always
• 1:01:58
  had these risks where left kind of untended to, there's bound eventually to be
• 1:02:04
  a preventable tragedy where where a girl loses her life because a dad doesn't get
• 1:02:08
  the help that he needs and he desperately tries to get it and he maybe
• 1:02:13
  he's removed from the house and he then can't protect his daughter. We're playing
• 1:02:17
  with fire like those kinds of things if they haven't already happened, and they
• 1:02:21
  might have, but they won't get report in the news. As examples of
• 1:02:23
  that they're going to They're going to happen from time to time. So if
• 1:02:29
  our only focus is on, you know, preventing tragedies of women and girls
• 1:02:34
  dying only for that reason alone, we should at least carve out some small
• 1:02:37
  amount of support and funding for the shelters for these dads to take these girls.
• 1:02:43
  Yes. Yeah, there was one additional question that I have a little
• 1:02:46
  bit about out on right field or left field. Do these organizations have they
• 1:02:54
  made a commitment to helping trans women our organization? No, no, no,
• 1:03:00
  no, because you've already said that you deal with male identified individuals.
• 1:03:05
  So and I assume that I'm not talking about your organization. I'm talking about
• 1:03:08
  these organizations that you're dealing with who have sort of circled the wagons against your
• 1:03:14
  organization. I'm just curious if they actually open their doors to trans women,
• 1:03:21
  if they've actually made that commitment. I think that's a work in progress.
• 1:03:25
  I think I have, and some of them are are not planning to and
• 1:03:30
  have made a conscious decision not to do that, and I don't. I
• 1:03:36
  think it's a real interesting debate that I've seen some signs of within, you
• 1:03:40
  know, the the women's service space. I'm not obviously in that space directly,
• 1:03:46
  but I hear things from the king are liaisons between them and us,
• 1:03:52
  and so, yeah, there are indications that they're not sure what to do
• 1:03:54
  with trans women. Despite the you know, lip service progressive talk, there
• 1:04:02
  is not actually necessarily a follow through when it comes to frontline service delivery for
• 1:04:08
  that community. For the record, we are inclusive and always have been of
• 1:04:12
  gay, bye and TRANSMN. Mm hmmm, well, I mean you're you're
• 1:04:15
  trying to service an under service population, so you're focusing on the male identified
• 1:04:19
  individual. So I wasn't directing that, uh that question you. It just
• 1:04:24
  seems to be rather rather an oversight for these organizations to uh ignore the issues
• 1:04:30
  of trans women completely. I would I would imagine, I mean you say
• 1:04:34
  that if you don't, don't they actually incorporate them, but that uh,
• 1:04:39
  you know that they they fail to recognize the well that trans women are often
• 1:04:44
  a very uh uh shall we say they're they're they're very much reflect affected by
• 1:04:53
  violence, and they're being excluded by these feminist organisms. Do a situation where
• 1:04:58
  you have to start drawing lines about whether you're going to allow trans women or
• 1:05:01
  transmen or you know, groups within that binary. And it's so frustrating because
• 1:05:06
  we're constantly being accused by our critics of we are reinforcing the gender binary.
• 1:05:13
  We're advocating, and our shelter is fully inclusive, unlike most of the rest
• 1:05:17
  of them. Yeah, an inclusive, holistic approach. Well, you know
• 1:05:20
  if binary is being you know, promulgated on the other side. Yeah,
• 1:05:25
  well, I mean they've essentially said, you know, men, male identified
• 1:05:29
  individuals need not apply. But I would honestly say, if there's any trans
• 1:05:32
  rights activists out there who are listening to this, you might want to look
• 1:05:35
  into that and look into the kind of bias and discrimination that trans women are
• 1:05:41
  facing. I mean, it's not in our wheelhouse. I'll point that out
• 1:05:45
  because we focus on many male identified individuals, men and boys, although we
• 1:05:49
  do recognize that trans women do face some significant issues as well. But you
• 1:05:56
  know, you might want to look into this and look into the discrimination against
• 1:06:00
  trans women that's currently occurring in Canadian domestic violence shelters. It's the thought is
• 1:06:05
  just just wanted to put that out there. Research project. Yeah, definitely,
• 1:06:11
  I have a rumble rant. I just want to read it before it
• 1:06:14
  disappears. Occupant forty two gave us twenty bucks and says no message, just
• 1:06:18
  some support. Thank you, Occupant twenty two, and I you know,
• 1:06:24
  if people do want to donate, I put a link to your Patreon in
• 1:06:29
  the description is that the best place or is there like another website justin Yeah,
• 1:06:34
  there is a we have a Canada Helps page if they're donating to Center
• 1:06:39
  for Men and Families. There's also a PayPal page for donating to the new
• 1:06:43
  charity, the one in the in the US. Anybody who is in the
• 1:06:46
  US and wants to take advantage of getting a US recognized tax receipt, make
• 1:06:50
  sure you donate to the Friends of Entity. That's the only way to get
• 1:06:54
  that. So what I'll do while we're talking is I will I will put
• 1:06:59
  into the Yeah, I go ahead and put it in there, and I'll
• 1:07:00
  drop it in there right, you know, right as we're done. The
• 1:07:05
  other thing is is that so so you've opened up this it's actually interest you
• 1:07:10
  know, really timely. You've opened up this newly established US based charity for
• 1:07:16
  the Canadian Center for Men and Families. And are you like, I don't
• 1:07:23
  know how long it's been, but are you seeing any like you know,
• 1:07:27
  any I guess action going on there? Are you excited about this? I
• 1:07:32
  think that this is a really good move of the United States has a much
• 1:07:36
  bigger population, tho's probably you know it probably yeah, ten times a size,
• 1:07:43
  right, So maybe you'll get like a lot more support. And I
• 1:07:45
  think that generally people here are becoming more aware of these issues. So you're
• 1:07:53
  you you probably are gonna have I'm not saying that Canada has no sympathy,
• 1:07:56
  but I think that the United States not a bad place to look for help,
• 1:08:01
  just because of the sheer number of people we have. So are you
• 1:08:04
  Are you excited about that? Are you seeing any anything going on there?
• 1:08:09
  Positive? Because you know, like you said, if it's gonna have to
• 1:08:12
  be privately funded, then you might as well, you know, go for
• 1:08:16
  it. Yeah, we're pulling out all the stops to take advantage of any
• 1:08:20
  private sources we can get our hands on. So we just announced it like
• 1:08:25
  literally in the last week. So it's it's a little bit too soon to
• 1:08:28
  tell. We have had already a number more than anticipated number of donations come
• 1:08:32
  in. Oh that's nice, but it is early days. I will say,
• 1:08:35
  though, the whole rationale for doing this was US supporters of the Center
• 1:08:41
  for Men and Families over the years. We're telling me we're giving, but
• 1:08:45
  we could give more, you know, and more regularly if we had the
• 1:08:48
  benefit of a US recognized tax receipt have you considered setting up an entity like
• 1:08:54
  this? And we got lawyers involved, we looked into it. We realized
• 1:08:57
  this was doable, and it took you know, took at a year because
• 1:09:00
  there's a formal process and it just came through in the summer and so there
• 1:09:04
  was some administrative work we had to do. And as soon as all that
• 1:09:06
  was in place, we realized, hey, it's the year end fundraiser and
• 1:09:10
  we're trying to raise more money than ever because we have some more ambitious projects
• 1:09:14
  than ever before, the expansion of our services across the country. And the
• 1:09:18
  timing is very good. So we announced it just last week and yeah,
• 1:09:23
  I think it's going to in time prove to be a major platform for accessing
• 1:09:28
  a pool of contributions that were kind of always available. But again, this
• 1:09:31
  is incentivizing a US donor base right way that just wasn't possible previously. Yeah,
• 1:09:40
  that's also great. Are there other ways that people can help out that
• 1:09:45
  maybe they don't you know, they can't really donate, but they want to
• 1:09:49
  support in other ways, maybe do some volunteer work or or just promote you
• 1:09:56
  know what you guys are doing. Absolutely, yeah, active on social media,
• 1:10:00
  so you you know, anything that gets awareness out there about what we're
• 1:10:04
  doing, and that could be in order to galvanize funding, but also getting
• 1:10:10
  men, men and boys aware that there is there, there is a place
• 1:10:14
  to go, you know that there is an agency that will listen to them,
• 1:10:18
  will take their needs seriously and can offer them the kind of support and
• 1:10:23
  healing that that they may be struggling to find. Any help with getting awareness
• 1:10:28
  of raising awareness of that through social media or connecting with with your personal networks
• 1:10:33
  is very appreciated. And then if folks are kind of locally in different parts
• 1:10:39
  of Canada where we're we're physically operating, it's a little bit easier to volunteer.
• 1:10:43
  But you know a lot of what we do is online now since the
• 1:10:45
  pandemic, many of our services are, so there are definitely ways of volunteering
• 1:10:49
  wherever you are in the world. Yeah, are you facing any so Okay,
• 1:10:55
  So trying to get public funding, there's obstacles, There's there's no oh,
• 1:11:00
  because I don't really know how it works in Canada, but there are
• 1:11:01
  are you facing any issues even with trying to like get things funded privately like
• 1:11:08
  bad press? Aside from what we already talked about, maybe you know some
• 1:11:13
  other ways, like I wonder if going this route is going to bring its
• 1:11:17
  own challenges. I guess we've not had a hit piece in a while,
• 1:11:24
  which is which is good. We do get press coverage from time to time,
• 1:11:28
  and it's it's generally fair or even positive. Oh well, that's good.
• 1:11:30
  I think the hit pieces are largely behind us. I have to say
• 1:11:34
  that we're always extremely careful about how we communicate with the media, and you
• 1:11:39
  would think when the shelter in Toronto opened, we would have done so with
• 1:11:43
  great fanfare and press releases in media, you know, press conferences, that
• 1:11:46
  sort of thing. We chose not to do that because at the time,
• 1:11:51
  we were dealing with setting up a shelter in a residential area and we were
• 1:11:57
  worried about neighborhood in neighbor responses. We were worried about if the city councilor
• 1:12:04
  might find out that this is happening and might not be a fan of men
• 1:12:09
  and boys issues. And that's the difference between doing what we do versus a
• 1:12:14
  women and girls organization, because when you operate in that space, you have
• 1:12:17
  no doubt that the city councilor and the members of Parliament and the media will
• 1:12:21
  be fawning and will be opening doors for you, and we'll be you know,
• 1:12:26
  falling over themselves to offer public support. They want to be attached to
• 1:12:29
  you, right So, but it's quite the opposite, is we're always fearful
• 1:12:33
  that not only will we not get that, but that actually could backfire,
• 1:12:36
  and that any of these people could end up being influential opponents, and that
• 1:12:40
  if the wrong person finds out that we're doing something you know, spectacular and
• 1:12:44
  really achieving for men and boys, they may decide they're going to make it
• 1:12:46
  their life's work to close us down. That's just always, you know,
• 1:12:50
  the thing that keeps me up at night. So as a result of that,
• 1:12:54
  we've actually had to be very careful about how much we engage with the
• 1:12:57
  media, and we don't take every opportunity to necessarily be putting out press releases
• 1:13:02
  and that sort of thing. As we grow and as we become more unstoppable,
• 1:13:08
  then there can be a bit of a pivot towards being much more aggressive
• 1:13:11
  in that space. But we're not quite there yet, and not to sound
• 1:13:14
  like a broken record, but we won't get there without a boost, you
• 1:13:17
  know, to our resources, which you know comes back to the appeal in
• 1:13:21
  this in this patriarchy that puts men's benefit ahead of women. I just I
• 1:13:29
  just had to put that out. Are you doing any like appearances, you
• 1:13:32
  know, like I know that you used to appear on like mainstream media news
• 1:13:38
  things to talk about what you do, like anything like that, just like
• 1:13:42
  other ways of getting the word out. We do that occasionally by invitation,
• 1:13:46
  you know, we'll be on podcasts and we love being on the Honey Badgers
• 1:13:51
  please have us back again soon, of course, and others that operate in
• 1:13:55
  this space. Mainstream media less commonly, but we have had coverage and really
• 1:14:00
  all of the major Canadian and international press over the lifetime of the organization,
• 1:14:06
  and we're always happy to uh to participate in more of that. But yeah,
• 1:14:12
  it's as I said, it's tough knowing when and how to communicate these
• 1:14:15
  kinds of what would otherwise be press worthy announcements and being very careful about how
• 1:14:21
  we communicate when we choose to, and it takes a lot of planning and
• 1:14:27
  careful strategic thinking, and very often when we do that, we do it
• 1:14:30
  in collaboration. We'll do a press conference with some of those partners from the
• 1:14:35
  other agencies that are more established than us, and that provides cover to to
• 1:14:42
  all of us if there's kind of safety and numbers. Yeah, wow,
• 1:14:45
  that's uh, that's really unfortunate. Like it's really great to see your dedication
• 1:14:51
  and how hard you're working to make sure that these issues get the attention that
• 1:14:56
  they deserve, but it's unfortunate to see the sheer amount of like pushback.
• 1:15:02
  It seems like you're you're getting So it's really amazing, Like you're you're doing
• 1:15:09
  I think more more work and more good work than uh than than you You
• 1:15:15
  are getting credit for it, really and and of course it's because you can't
• 1:15:20
  really take that credit too much because you open yourself up to potential enemies who
• 1:15:26
  will try to, you know, take you down for what you're doing.
• 1:15:30
  So I think that's that's why, you know, spaces like ours are important
• 1:15:32
  because we're starting to get those those those networks of people who are willing to
• 1:15:39
  look at these issues as they are, rather than through a framework that they
• 1:15:45
  find personally profitable or flattering or comfortable or whatever it is that makes people adhere
• 1:15:53
  to the idea that women constantly need to be saved and from men by men
• 1:15:59
  somehow, but you know, yes, it is that. That's that narrative.
• 1:16:01
  It's very very comfortable for people, and unfortunately the initiatives like yours that
• 1:16:08
  run counter to it find you encounter a lot of difficulty, even though it's
• 1:16:12
  so critical to deal with these issues, the issues that you deal with,
• 1:16:15
  and to plug these holes in our services. So yeah, thank you,
• 1:16:19
  thank you for coming on, and thank you for doing the stuff that you
• 1:16:23
  do. Like it's it's a thankless task. So I'm thanking you. Yeah,
• 1:16:28
  really shiated. Yeah, that's that's very kind, and yeah, you're
• 1:16:31
  outlet and others like it definitely are making a critical contribution to a conversation that
• 1:16:38
  has so few places where we can speak freely about what I keep saying.
• 1:16:43
  But truly our life and death issues absolutely absolutely. How's your family? Justin
• 1:16:47
  they're doing very well. The little one is being put to bed, I
• 1:16:51
  think as we speak. Yeah, that's great about supporting this work. They
• 1:17:00
  know it's not always easy, and they're very patient and flexible with me.
• 1:17:05
  So oh yeah, that's good. That's good. Well, I mean,
• 1:17:11
  I guess we'll just mention your you know, like what people should know and
• 1:17:16
  where to go. I will give put the links in the description. But
• 1:17:21
  yeah, thanks for telling us about that. And I'm really I'm looking forward
• 1:17:26
  to seeing you guys grow. I want to see some of that stuff here
• 1:17:29
  in the States. I don't know if you can expand internationally, but you
• 1:17:32
  know, it would be cool. We're open to partnerships both sides of the
• 1:17:38
  border right now. We're we got kind of soft resources that we provide as
• 1:17:45
  upon request. But yeah, absolutely, if there's anybody in the States that
• 1:17:47
  is looking to set up something along these lines, we think we have a
• 1:17:54
  good model that we're happy to to share with interested parties. Oh well,
• 1:17:59
  that's good. We'll pay attention to audience if there's anybody over there that's thinking
• 1:18:02
  about, you know, building something, maybe cafe or I'm sorry, Justin
• 1:18:08
  can help you guys out formerly of cafe but no longer now it's CCMF.
• 1:18:16
  All right, Well any oh, I'm sorry. Any final thoughts from either
• 1:18:20
  of you guys before we wrap it up. I think I talked quite a
• 1:18:26
  bit. I think, yeah, it's it's hard. It's hard to go
• 1:18:30
  back to to go against the current, against the wind of people's expectations and
• 1:18:36
  people what people find comfortable, which is men saving women or women saving women,
• 1:18:45
  but not recognizing that men can be victims of women and that sometimes they
• 1:18:48
  need help too. So that's that's just it's a very uncomfortable narrative for a
• 1:18:54
  lot of people, and it takes a lot of grit to build something in
• 1:19:00
  in the face of that kind of crosswind constant artillery barrage. How it feels
• 1:19:11
  sometimes, I guess I've too talked a lot, so I don't have much
• 1:19:14
  new things to say, but I will just come back to a positive conclusion,
• 1:19:18
  which is, despite the obstacles, and we've always had them, our
• 1:19:23
  community has always rallied, and what we're dealing with is a bit unprecedented,
• 1:19:27
  and I hope the rally is going to match that level of intensity with something
• 1:19:31
  positive. So please, you know, give what you can. We now
• 1:19:34
  have the ability on both sides of the border to provide these tax receipts.
• 1:19:39
  But beyond that, I mean, you're getting to an important cause, which
• 1:19:42
  is having international you know, repercussions for men and boys. And I thank
• 1:19:46
  you both again for having me on the show. Yeah, please do please,
• 1:19:49
  if you're listening, please support this initiative. It's really it's critical.
• 1:19:53
  It's like the tree roots slowly growing and breaking the rock. Yeah, that
• 1:20:00
  kind of thing. So you know, add to this push to get this,
• 1:20:04
  get these shelters, this shelter up in BC and hopefully in Alberta and
• 1:20:10
  then maybe the world. Yeah maybe. All right, Well, I guess
• 1:20:15
  we'll wrap up the show there. I didn't get any more super messaging,
• 1:20:19
  but I did get the one thing. So thank you to Occupant forty two
• 1:20:24
  for the support. Really appreciate it. As far as the rest of you
• 1:20:28
  guys, if you guys liked this video, please smash that like button subscribe.
• 1:20:31
  If you're not already subscribed, hit the bell notifications, leave us a
• 1:20:34
  comment, let us know what you guys think about what we discussed on the
• 1:20:38
  show today. Take a look at all of the links for the CCMF stuff
• 1:20:45
  in the description, and we will talk to you guys in the next video.