May 10, 2025 - Epoch Times
04:34
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| In the United States, you have a society in which, in this wonderful immortal phrase, people are free to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. | |
| Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. | |
| Those were not the values that we chose to highlight when we wrote down in our Constitution what it was that we were about. | |
| We chose to talk instead about peace, order, and good government. | |
| You see, I think those phrases actually summarize in a shorthand way some slightly different angles on, you know, what's the purpose of government? | |
| How do people fit into a larger society? | |
| What are we trying to do together? | |
| Remember that America broke away through a violent revolution. | |
| From the Crown and the United Kingdom, from Great Britain, Canadians never experienced that. | |
| In fact, people often talk about the 13 colonies, forgetting that there were actually 16 colonies, 13 of whom rebelled and three of whom remained loyal to the Crown. | |
| So even back at the time of the Revolution, there were parts of what became Canada who said, yeah, that's not the route we want to go. | |
| We tend to be people who believe more in the quiet, thoughtful evolution of institutions rather than liking this idea of, oh, you know, if you don't like what you've got now, a radical break, start again, reinvent. | |
| That seems to us a very American way of thinking about things. | |
| I don't say that in a critical way. | |
| I'm a great admirer of America. | |
| Canada has chosen an evolutionary path in which we put a little more emphasis on the idea of the common good, a little less emphasis on the idea of individual liberty as the be-all and end-all. | |
| We're great believers in individual freedom. | |
| But we don't think that individual freedom is the entire answer to the purpose of Canada. | |
| We think... | |
| Individual freedom in the context of an ordered society that believes that we collectively can do things together that individually we would find difficult. | |
| From the outside, those differences don't appear very great. | |
| You know, Europeans come to Canada and they say, "Why are you so fussed about not being thought Americans?" | |
| From the inside, the differences to us are quite obvious and without in any way feeling that it means that we're superior to America, it does make us feel that we've chosen a slightly different path in North America and it's one, you know, that our ancestors fought and suffered and paid for and that we have inherited. | |
| And it's ours. | |
| And that matters to us. | |
| In some of your recent writings, you've gone to great pains to try to explain the way of thinking or the approach of US President Trump and the Trump administration. | |
| And I thought, reading this, I thought to myself, I think you understand it better than probably a lot of Americans. | |
| Obviously not a majority of Americans, but some. | |
| I wanted you to kind of reprise that for me a little bit here. | |
| One of the reasons I've been thinking about this is precisely because Donald Trump is looming so large in the Canadian consciousness right now. | |
| I have seen a lot of my compatriots, you know, running around like chickens with their heads cut off saying, oh my god, Donald Trump is a madman. | |
| You can't understand what he's doing. | |
| There's no rhyme or reason to it. | |
| And I looked at what Donald Trump was doing and I thought, okay, I don't have to like it. | |
| That's a separate question. | |
| But if the question is, can I understand it? |
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