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Sept. 14, 2021 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:09:10
Justin Trudeau and the Election that Should Have Never Been | Rex Murphy | EP 191
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If the result of this election comes that at the end of this exercise in which he exposes so many people, the Liberals return with a minority, What was the point of this?
And what happens if the result is, let's be generous to him, the Liberal government is returned in a minority position, so we're two years in, 400 billion deficit, no one wanted the election, you can't tell me what it's about, and at the end of it, we're in the same spot?
Is this a country or is this some sort of playground?
I'm pleased today to be able to discuss the Canadian political landscape with Mr. Roeck.
Rex Murphy.
Rex is a journalist extremely well known to Canadians.
He was a Regular host of CBC Radio 1's Cross-Country Checkup, a nationwide call-in show for 21 years before stepping down in September 2015.
I spoke with Rex about his career on, and various other matters, June 3rd, 2021, a few months ago, and that video has accrued about 800,000 views.
It's been very popular.
And I read one of Rex's columns about our Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, a couple of days ago, and then watched the leaders' debate, and it struck me that It would be a really good time to talk to him again about all about a variety of things, but obviously most importantly for Canadians, the current election.
So we're going to talk about the election, its whys and wherefores.
We're going to talk about the leaders and we're going to talk about the debate.
And so thanks very much, Rex, for agreeing to talk to me today.
I'm really looking forward to hearing what you have to say about all this.
Let's start with the election.
So what's going on?
Why was this election called?
What's it about?
That is the key question of this election, and it has been the key question from the very first moment.
And we're in the fourth week now, by the way, for the benefit of listeners.
And for the first couple of weeks, it actually threatened to become the issue of the election.
In other words, the so-called ballot question, which is how the experts talk of this, will be, why did you call the election?
Well, here's background, and it's necessary to have this background.
Mr.
Trudeau has been in office for two years.
He's received the mandate just two years ago or less.
He's had one of the most comfortable runs as a minority, one minority, as a minority prime minister that anybody has ever had.
Now it's true we were visited by COVID, But this arranged two dynamics.
First of all, Mr.
Trudeau and the NDP, which is the supporting party, have obviously reached some great accord.
So Mr.
Trudeau has had no real challenge in administering his parliamentary or executive functions.
And secondly, with the arrival of the pandemic in particular, this gave great license for abrogating or staying away from or diminishing The active and full role of the Parliament itself.
So two things.
A very comfortable alliance with the NDP and the Bloc when the occasion demanded it.
And secondly, because Parliament was effectively eviscerated or gutted.
It was closed down.
Decessions were limited.
Committees folded.
Mr.
Trudeau himself stayed away from Parliament.
All his major announcements for a single year.
By the way, totaling $400 billion into deficit.
Imagine a minority politician.
O'Toole said during the debate that the Trudeau government is borrowing $500 million a day?
Can that possibly be true?
I can't do the mental ribbing, but if you talk about $400 billion, Then obviously, and now we have a debt, that's the deficit, a debt, some recorded at $1.3 trillion, and one of the public officers who accounts for Canada's finances is saying that it may not be paid off until 2070, at which point it will all have totaled something like $3 trillion.
Now, when he called the election, I'm giving you all these things that he had an unhindered hand.
In racking up the largest amounts of public spending since the Confederation began, he didn't have to face Parliament to any degree like other Prime Ministers because, again, closed down.
All these announcements came from the steps of his cottage.
And on the day—I'm getting to your question—on the day he called the election, the justification offered that day—and this is why I wanted to start here—was that he was meeting so much obstruction in Parliament.
And I said to myself, well, holy Lord!
You know, you could combine his father, John Thiefenbaker, Lester Pearson, and John A. MacDonald, put them all in one man, and they wouldn't have had anything like the ease, the control, and the absolute dominance of the parliamentary function.
The committees were dissolved.
The accountability people didn't have enough funds.
The Auditor General asked, with all this money going out the window, I need more people to keep it checked.
There was no money for the Auditor General, even as you spent $400 billion.
We are not the U.S. That's the deficit.
And he made a pledge in 2015 that by 2019, the deficit of Canada would be gone.
We would have a balanced budget.
So let's start with that one.
The reason I'm calling this election Is that the opposition is obstructionist, and I cannot get my way through.
That was so palpably, so absolutely, adamantly empty as a reason.
The real reason, and a lot of them, is that during that period the polls were showing that because of all the money flowing out, Canadians have never received directly so many dollars before.
And that despite, and we'll go back to this, despite his initial stumblings, and there were many over this pandemic and scandals, nonetheless, he was very popular versus Mr.
Roe too.
So there was a hope of a majority.
And I'll wind this little section down, but it's a very important thing to ask.
The hope of a majority said to his advisors and him, okay, we have two full years left.
We have an extremely compliant parliament.
No other foreign minister has had it as easy as us.
However, if we went now, we might get a majority.
And there are only two reasons why you would throw away two years of an already established mandate For the hope of four years on a gamble.
One is the polls, the second is this.
This is the deeper one for me anyway, and I'm not a conspiracy guy.
All that money going out, not being properly accounted for, parliament not exercising its functions.
Is it possible that the Chudor government is really, really worried?
That when the pandemic slows down and people return their attention to the administration of government and how and where these huge amounts of money went and how they were supervised, how well they were administered, who received them,
I think there was a fear that if he remained in minority and the pandemic reduced the pressure So that the parliament could resume its function, the press could get off the one topic, and they would start to look at the record of that spending, how it was decided, who established their priorities.
And on top of all of that, of course, we get into those.
He's had, as you know, a reign, R-A-I-N, a reign of scandals during this particular period.
And maybe he thought an election could kind of wash that off him.
But it was called for only one reason.
To secure a majority for the next four years.
Now how that's going, we will talk about it.
It seems like a strange gamble to take if your initial supposition is correct too, which is that he was essentially leading a de facto majority government because of the unconditional support of the NDP. So it seems strange to throw that away if that's been functioning.
I mean, it's going to tilt the Liberal policy to the left to some degree, but I can't imagine that that's really that big a problem for...
For Mr.
Trudeau.
You're pinpointing what is, again, to me, this is the unanswerable question.
This is not the partisan observation.
Everyone will tell you this.
Parliament rarely met.
It met only in Zoom calls.
The press had to stand every morning outside the cottage.
The normal scrutinies, the normal dynamics, the internal committees.
All of this was abruptly just gone with at the same time.
At the very same time, there was a motion made by the then finance minister that he wanted the minority government to have the authority to expend monies for two years.
It's not made up without parliamentary approval.
That shocked even them, and that was denied.
However, because of, as I say, the closet arrangements between the BQ and the NDP, whenever he wanted to shovel out $6 billion here, $10 billion there, $4 billion there, up to $400 billion he has.
Okay, so let me play devil's advocate here a bit.
So we could say Mr.
Trudeau said he would have Canadians' backs.
Desperate times require desperate measures.
Canada is rich enough to afford this largesse, so why not open the pumps and flood people with money while they're in this crisis situation?
What do you see as the benefits of that, say, but also the medium and long-term dangers?
Well, in any crisis, like the 2008 recession, Prime Minister Harper released more money than the Prime Minister Harper would normally do.
However, you see, there's a double problem with this particular...
Sure, you have to respond to the pandemic, but some of the responses are very far from the actual problem that they're dealing with.
Secondly, and this is a very crucial thing, the pandemic had a second dynamic.
It shut down all of the businesses, service things, hotels, taxis, construction, projects, schools.
Everything is shut down.
And the economy of Canada during the last year and a half to two, we haven't got the measure of it.
It has taken a devastating A devastating and a savage hit.
So at the very period that your economy is actually unmeasured, because we're not having the measurements done, hitting a crater, we're shooting a deficit past Uranus.
And there's no one, the parliamentary budget officer can't get the thing, the auditor general can't get the press, and this great flood of money keeps everybody happy, so the normal, again, the accoutrements of parliamentary oversight and accountability are not there.
It was a flood.
Let's continue the discussion with regards to what this election is about and I watched the debate last week and When I was about halfway through watching it, I had this idea which was The the responses that the leaders that all the different leaders of the federal parties had to the questions That isn't really where the debate was being won or lost The debate was won or lost before it even started.
And the reason for that was because of the topics that were chosen.
And so let's look at the debate as an entity in itself.
Forget about the content.
The first thing that happened was that there was a land acknowledgement.
Indigenous land acknowledgment.
And so, you know, I've seen those things happen over and over, and they always make me wonder.
It's like, well, who decided that every important occasion in Canadian life, political life, was going to be signified by one of these land acknowledgments?
And who benefits from them?
And what do they really mean?
And what are they setting us up for?
And so, I would say, regardless of their intrinsic merit...
It's certainly the case that the idea of indigenous land acknowledgement and that that should precede every discussion of import is a progressive idea.
And so what that means is the debate is framed instantly from the perspective of the progressives.
And then you look at the structure of the debate, you have The NDP, left.
Green Party, left.
Liberals, left.
And you have the lone conservative, Aaron O'Toole.
And then you have the choice of questions.
And I found this...
So imagine that the most significant piece of information that emerges from the debate is not how the leaders responded, but what the questions were.
Because if I wanted to ask a leader something, I'd say, Well, what do you think the most pressing issues facing Canadians are?
And then I'd like to hear the answers, but I'd like to know what are the questions?
What are the issues?
And then by participating in this debate as it was structured, Aaron O'Toole, the putative conservative, ceded the conceptual territory so that half the debate was taken up on climate change and reconciliation.
And only a quarter of it on affordability of all the absurd topics.
That means the economy.
That means the entire business of governance.
And so...
It's so strange to see us framing our entire national discussion in this haphazard, ad hoc way that brings a set of presuppositions to the table before the debate even starts and to see no one object to that.
It's like, is climate change really that crucial?
A crisis right now?
I can tell you, first of all, I got to agree with one very big point.
It's a conceptual point.
When you set these things up, as you say, with a ritual invocation, obviously from the both progressive side, you said the prayer of land acknowledgement.
You're back in some sort of progressive church.
So now you've established the ethos and the atmosphere.
And then, and you're absolutely correct.
I'm not saying that just to please you.
They call it a debate.
The selection of what is to be talked about is the debate.
Yes, absolutely.
We should say that over and over.
We should say that over and over.
The selection of what to talk about is the debate.
Yeah, it is.
So it's lost to begin with by the Conservatives.
Now to get to a particular.
The climate change, I think you timed it with something like 26 minutes.
In Quebec, in Quebec.
There was a poll on yesterday of the seven main issues in Quebec.
The seventh issue, the seventh, the seventh was climate change.
If you go down to Newfoundland and you try to tell someone down there that climate change is the number one issue, they'll throw you off a wharf.
How about Albertans?
Albertans, if you go out there and tell them that the ruined nation of Alberta and that the war against its central and abiding industry and the threat of taking all the oil workers off their jobs and sending them out to mold windmills.
I was out in Alberta just a week ago.
Alberta should be a topic of the debate.
How has it been treated in the last 10 years?
The elimination of the pipelines, the Niagara of obstruction and protest over a legitimate industry and the demonization of a single province.
There are no demonstrations against China, Venezuela, Russia, any of the oil producing countries.
The Arabs?
One province in one country is attacked by its own.
And Mr.
Trudeau, when he opens his mouth without the usual guards, speaks about, oh, we can't close the oil industry tomorrow.
Instead, go back to your point, climate change gets set up in that thing as if it's a mobile block.
The science is a single word.
Okay, I want to talk a little bit more about that too.
People should be warned about this.
Okay, so I was thinking more about climate change is that there is no conceptual difference from a governance perspective between the terms climate change and the terms global governance.
And here's why.
It's because climate is the entire planet.
It's every system in the planet.
And change doesn't mean change, it means existential crisis, to paraphrase the green leader, Annamie Paul.
So think about what we're doing, Canadians.
Think about what we're doing.
We're taking this phrase, climate change, we conceptualize it as a problem, then we conceptualize it perhaps as a crisis.
All right, and then we're ceding administrative power to governmental officials who parade their commitment to climate change as a high moral virtue.
And then they can say, they can point to any piece of evidence they want that supports the crisis nature of the climate change.
And that's always going to be there, a flood, a drought, fire, hurricanes, that proves that climate change is not only real, but it's an instant existential crisis and that you're immoral if you don't put it at the top of the list.
And because it means global governance, you essentially cede all your moral authority and all your policy-making power to any government that wants to do anything they want, as long as they use climate change as a justification.
And that should worry environmentalists too, because what that does, using that catch-all buzz phrase, which really means global governance and nothing else, Is that it obscures the attempts of anybody serious to deal with micro-problems of the environment that could actually be solved.
It's a terrible thing.
I could link it, by the way.
I don't think this is at all a far-fetched idea.
We're being...
Heard it in some degree under the demands of the pandemic itself.
We're becoming more relaxed in the suspension or the abridgment or the abandonment of some of our normal legitimate democratic functions.
And I see that the pandemic in certain ways It's almost a preparatory course.
Yes.
That once you build a habit...
By the way, people's health is sacred, so you really can't object to us moving into this territory.
If you have a good enough cause, you can build up the administrative state to heights never seen before.
Climate change is the perfect excuse for that.
And you'd say, well, climate change is a terrible catastrophe and all of that.
Well, I've interviewed Bjorn Lomberg a number of times.
And if you want an intelligent discussion about the dangers...
He's sane.
He's sane.
And the thing about Lomberg, too, is he cares.
He's an environmentally-minded person.
Yes, he is.
And he does his cost-benefit analysis with the input of the best economists in the world.
And he'll take a look at a country.
His team takes a look at a country and says, Well, first of all, let's specify the problems that face us, rank order them, and then rank order them again in terms of how we can spend money, the most efficient way to make progress on these areas.
They do it.
They have a policy generating apparatus, an analytic apparatus that does that.
Now, if you want good information about the climate, I think Lomburg is a reliable source.
We can't overstate the danger of precisely what you said, and we both sound increasingly like a couple of conspiracy theorists, and that's a terrible thing.
I mean, you've been a mainstream journalist forever and a very reliable one, but it is definitely the case that we are getting accustomed to the ceding of our civil liberties.
And as you pointed out, as long as the reason is good enough, and you're immoral for even objecting to the fact of the reason, then you're dead in the water to begin with.
And this is happening to the conservatives all the time, and they don't object, and it's not good.
Two points to come out of this.
I go back to your, let's say, before this particular period, to your main talks three and four years ago.
One of the aspects of our current culture is that a set of managerial or clerical minds, the bureaucrats, the academics, the walk, They've given themselves or arrogated to themselves the right to determine when a topic is finished and when it is not.
And the earliest indication of so-called cancel culture, and I think the most damning one, goes back to Al Gore, goes back to 2001 and Academy Awards, that once this global warming, aka climate change, aka global weirding, once it became a big international political ball, The line was, the science is settled.
In other words, our version of what this thing is, but much more importantly, the measures that we are saying are necessary get folded into inverted commas.
Yes, that's the crucial thing.
That's the crucial thing.
They're trying to tell you in advance you can't argue the main point.
My difficulty with Mr.
O'Toole in that debate goes exactly again to your understanding.
Mr.
O'Toole is sliding along with that one.
If he really believes that climate change is existential and that Alberta has to rip up its own economy, let him say it.
I would much rather see someone in opposition who said, I haven't fully accepted that this apocalyptic menace that you've been peddling for 25 years is an established thing, and I certainly don't accept that I can't argue with you over the proposals that come out of it.
But on that debate, everyone had to be holy, and everyone, what's your climate change plan?
There is no plan in Canada to stop a world event.
It's illogical.
Not only that...
It isn't obvious.
It's by no means obvious that we know how to stop it anyways.
And it certainly isn't clear that we know what measures should be taken.
I mean, the Americans have actually decreased their carbon output.
I think it's 14% over the last 10 years.
Why?
Fracking!
Now, you find me one progressive who bloody well predicted that.
And that's...
See, you made the point exactly right, is that...
People jump up and down about climate change and they say the science is settled and you're a flat earth or a backward son of a bitch if you don't agree with it.
But that is just a proxy for their claim that I know how to deal with it and these policies, all of which just happen to be progressive, are the only means by which this can possibly be redressed.
And that is not only patently untrue, it's quite clear to me that in all probability the cure It's going to be far greater than the disease.
Oh, absolutely.
Well, let's take Canada at the present minute.
We're in the election again.
The fact that the Trudeau government in particular, because flying virtue flags is about the only exercise they know how to do perfectly, Climate change, global warming, saving the world, the COP meetings, the IPCC. This is to Justin Trudeau, his idea of the Eucharist.
And he hired one of the most adamant, intense climate activists ever, Gerald Butts, to be his principal man.
This is the key big idea, and it's obsessional, ritualistic, and in Trudeau's case, possibly even religious.
Yes, I agree that it's religious.
One of the things I've been thinking through psychologically most recently is the psychological ramifications and the political ramifications of the Old New Testament statement to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God.
Gods.
And the problem seems to me to be psychologically is that once you stop rendering unto God what is God, so you muddy up the religious domain, you remove it, then all sorts of things that shouldn't become, that shouldn't be religious, become religious.
There's no getting rid of the instinct.
It just transfers to something else.
And this save-the-planet mentality...
Well, your land acknowledgements are a ritual token for mission.
By the way, even the fact that the nation's flag is at half-staff, I don't know now for how many weeks.
That's another religious...
By the way, our flag is at half-mast during an election, and we haven't even mentioned Afghanistan, but I must go back one more quick point on the cost of global warming politics.
You've estranged the entire western provinces.
There is real anger, there is real passion, and there is certainly disenchantment that Alberta, a full, vigorous, helpful province that provided jobs for half of Canada during a recession, is now being targeted because global warming as the mandarins of Ottawa and Montreal and Toronto and the news media, they want to be wholly on this one as well.
Alberta has become a leprous state.
It's a pariah, and we're risking our own confederation because of the obsessions of some of these high-class ideologues who do not know reality.
Yes, well, we could think, broadly speaking, even in terms of the future security of the West as a whole.
It's like the Americans should be buying oil from Canada, not from the Arabs, obviously.
And all that's going to happen if we shut down the Alberta industry, apart from the unbelievable economic damage that it's going to do, and the alienation to that province, and the catastrophic stupidity that's involved is to cede more power to states that have held us over a barrel, so to speak, a barrel of oil ever since 1971.
It's like you saw what happened.
To Germany when they became over-dependent on Russia for their pet petroleum resources.
It's like we're being run by naive moralistic children.
You talked about this academic coterie of people who are holier than thou.
I really found that characteristic of Anna M. Paul.
The green leader.
She reminds me of everything that I detest about academics, the worst academics.
And there's this moral superiority combined with this absolute certainty that a particular kind of intellectual approach is so much superior that anyone who would dare to question it has to be both ignorant and malevolent.
You're seeing that also in this election now.
Mr Trudeau goes around like a spin top.
He's now onto this thing about vaccination and that if you have a disposition or a set of arguments, I'm not getting into the vaccination debate as vaccination.
People who have civil liberties, from the mistrust they have of certain institutions, they're now anti-vaxxers.
In other words, they're climate deniers.
You see, we're getting camps, and he's really coming down on that.
But this comes as you...
Yeah, he said that he had no sympathy for people.
No sympathy for them at all.
No sympathy.
Yep.
It's so interesting to see.
Because, you know, a leader should be, in some sense, agnostic about such things, I would say.
I talked to John Anderson, who used to be the Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, about COVID policy.
And this is something we talked about.
I'd like your thoughts on it.
So this is obviously just a sketch, a proposal.
So we have all these vaccines.
And I'm vaccinated, by the way.
I have two vaccinations.
I'm not saying that because I'm proud of it or anything like that.
That's what I did.
And if people don't want to do it, there are people in my family who don't want to get vaccinated.
It's like That's your right.
It's a fundamental right, I would say, guaranteed by the UN, among other organizations, the right to refuse medical treatment.
In any case, so we have all these vaccines, and hypothetically, they're for everyone's benefit.
So you say, look, you have until December 15th to be vaccinated.
We're opening everything up then.
And it's on you.
We're going to increase ICU spending in case you get sick, in case the unvaccinated get sick.
We're still going to take care of you, but we think the vaccines are effective and they're available to you and we can't risk any more damage to the economy.
Like, Anderson's comment was, well, we've been letting doctors, physicians, for example, of a certain stripe, let's say, drive political policy without paying any attention whatsoever to the burgeoning economic cost of this.
What are we going to see, Rex?
Are we going to see a massive return of inflation in the aftermath of this when the economy teeters?
I think that's, again, go back right to the very beginning.
Why this election?
Apart from the vanity of perhaps getting his majority, that the consequences of the last two years of policies that have been enacted, the various positions that have been taken, and by the way, the multiple confusions from the beginning, we're going to start seeing some of that.
And then when the pandemic finally lifts and the economy is revealed as the rubble it has become, The anger out there that we may have done all of this, and it may not have been either the most efficient or even the most correct, and in the meantime, we've bankrupted the entire national treasury.
There is an awful wind coming down from the north over the next year or two, and that wind would have been too strong, once it gets to the violent peak that it would, for his minority government arrangement to sustain itself.
He needs a majority.
I'm thinking of the damn...
He needs his ice wall of a majority government to stay there for the next four years.
By the way, here's another little subtext.
This is very interesting.
We're having an election.
He's summoned all the people of Canada, almost 40 million, in the middle of a pandemic in which social contact is governed and distancing and masking, but he has called an event together Most multitudinous that you possibly could in the middle of the damn pandemic to discuss the pandemic.
And if the result of this election comes that at the end of this exercise in which he exposes so many people, the liberals return with a minority, What was the point of this?
And what happens if the result is, let's be generous to him, the Liberal government is returned in a minority position, so we're two years in, 400 billion deficit, no one wanted the election, you can't tell me what it's about, and at the end of it, we're in the same spot?
Is this a country or is this some sort of playground?
Well, it looks...
Let me ask you a question, too, about the topics of the debate.
Because I want to hit that over and over.
The fact that that territory was ceded to begin with.
People really have to understand this, is that the topics are the debate, because that tells what everyone says is important.
Okay, so reconciliation, we haven't talked about that yet, took up a tremendous chunk of the debate.
That's in the middle of a pandemic and during the initial phases of what's likely to be an economic crisis.
Okay, so one of the things the debate should have been about, as far as I can tell, in a serious way, is the COVID shutdown.
It's like, we need an array of opinions about exactly what...
Do you want to stay locked down, everyone?
Like, what sort of risk are we willing to take?
And that's...
So that, in my way of thinking, that was the number one topic.
And this affordability issue is also so comical.
It's like...
Were the people who put the debate topics together so ignorant about the way that reality is structured that they believe that shoveling every bit of the discussion about the economy into one 20-minute section of the debate under the heading affordability, that that wasn't appropriate conceptually?
Isn't that reminiscent of Trudeau's statement that he isn't interested in monetary policy?
Isn't that the same thing?
Think about it for a second.
I'll underline it in a different way.
I've said twice or three times we have a $400 billion deficit.
It's historic.
A $1.3 trillion debt.
It's historic.
Brought in by a prime minister who then announces this is $400 billion, $1 trillion, $3.
I don't think about monetary policy.
Well, put those two together.
This is so much a disjunctive.
You could only have someone who doesn't know what monetary policy is not worry about these things, and money is there to be printed or thrown out.
Well, that's what I see conceptually in the structure of the debate.
It's like, all that kind of detailed nonsense, that's for lesser minds.
We'll just shovel that under affordability and we'll donate 20 minutes to it because we know how important can that possibly be compared to...
Well, on that debate, there's one that I'd like you to consider.
This election was called, as I said, in the middle of a pandemic, but it also happened on the same day, and I really like your opinion on this, and on the same hour almost, that an episode in Afghanistan that took 20 years, and in the case of some of our soldiers, well over a decade,
158 dead, so many wounded families, we had honor trips, we had journalists going to Afghanistan, we made pledges to the girls and women, Feminism is going on, and when the day that it shuts down and the Taliban walk in and nullify, and Canadian citizens are stranded, and fixers and interpreters that work with our soldiers and our journalists are there, And he calls it an election.
Boris Johnson was the next day resummoned Parliament.
Do you realize how little debate we've had on an issue?
I was at the Journal, at the National for this, the amount of coverage of the Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan and what they were doing and what they were suffering and the highway of heroes, the great boost, the trip走, and suddenly it's just not there.
Why is not the government saying to the mothers and fathers of those veterans that lost their lives, to the soldiers who were there, we now wish to speak to you.
You gave us 11 years of limb and life, and it turns to a nullity.
I must direct some of my political advice or understanding to you, because you must be sitting there saying, why did I go over there?
What about my friend that I can't get back?
Okay, so let's take a brief foray in that direction.
I mean, I've been watching to some degree.
I'm certainly no expert.
Well, I'm no expert in any of this.
That's for sure.
I'm just watching with my jaw agape, fundamentally.
The State Department, the US, keeps sending out missives that are sort of reminiscent of our federal cabinet minister's comment about the Taliban being our brothers.
It's like they're surprised, they seem surprised that they seem to expect that the Taliban would first of all abide by some sort of like quasi-progressive international standards.
That they would have something resembling an inclusive government which meant including women and for example just to begin with that they would act like People who are completely unlike the Taliban.
And now that that isn't happening, which everyone could have predicted with absolute certainty, the State Department must have seemed to be those of surprise.
It's like, well, this isn't what we expected.
And so I would presume that...
That sort of thinking must have permeated the Trudeau cabinet.
It looks like it because otherwise why would she say such a thing?
Or are they pretending?
You'd have to be a beach rock not to know what the Taliban is like.
And if you look, even yesterday, I saw pictures of two journalists.
They were stripped to the waist and their legs were bare.
And they were striped with awful stripes.
You saw another woman getting savagely beaten.
You see now that they've divided the roles.
You know that this is a fundamentalist, tyrannical, barbarous government.
What upsets me and what I think should be, or not almost, morally in this election, We made a moral commitment, which we didn't have to make, but if you make them, you better hang on to them.
And we talked so loud and so proudly of what Canada, Canada's back, was doing for all these wretched people in Afghanistan who had suffered, but now we're building schools and we're building water stops.
And we were, and some of the Canadians, I've met many Canadian soldiers coming back, you know, they were so happy that they were doing something for people less well off.
And when the whole enterprise collapses, The next speech the next day is we're going to send $500 million to seniors.
Do you not speak to the biggest foreign policy issue of the last 10 years involving the most respected institution in this country, which is its military, and go to your point, on a debate, and we only have one in English, you don't have Afghanistan on it at all.
Yeah, well, that's military policy.
That's another one of those sort of messy details, you know, that people who are high-minded don't ever give any consideration to, especially not when we can have discussions about global salvation and climate change.
And that climate change is lovely, too, for people who can speak Who want to speak in, what would you call them, impressive cliches, because it isn't an actual problem.
An actual problem has to be conceptualized as small enough in some sense so that you could hypothetically take action that would have a fairly determinate outcome, right?
So you have to break it down into a...
A problem that's manageable.
Very, very difficult thing to do when you're talking about something like climate change, which involves everything.
I want to fix the world's weather, yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
I tell you what, here's the test.
I'm going to retool energy policy globally.
It's like, really, are you?
You really, you can't even, you don't even know how your car works.
Here's the test, and this is a really good one, and I think it's extremely pertinent.
I wrote a little thing, not because I wrote it.
I wrote a little thing.
I believe you on climate change, and I believe you have the technical expertise to do it, and I believe that Canada can actually be the fundamental lever to change the climate of the world.
But first, I want a small demonstration.
You promised that we wouldn't have any boil water advisories on a number of localized indigenous reserves.
These are small projects, environmental projects too, when you think about them.
Tell you what, when every single boil advisory is canceled and when the water on all the reserves is completely safe and the promises you have made for 30 years on this minuscule problem, minuscule in comparison to global warming, then bring in your global warming The problems they can deal with, they depart from.
The problems that they know they can't handle, they're more than willing to talk forever about them.
And they're all in 2050 or 2075 or 2120.
They like the problems 50 years out.
The one up north and the promise made in 2015 that these advisories would be over.
That's just, well, that's a problem we could solve.
So obviously, we're not going to.
Give us the ones we can't.
So let's talk a bit about this reconciliation issue, too, because that was one-fifth of the debate.
And so the basic proposition is something like the Indigenous people of Canada have had a hard time, historically speaking, and the federal and provincial governments have been complicit in that, and by extension, all those who are part of that governmental structure.
And fair enough.
But then I was listening, and...
I have some familiarity with Native culture, not a lot, and some real sympathy for people who survived the worst of the residential schools.
And I know someone, I'm very close to someone, who was brutalized beyond comprehension in such a system.
It's appalling what happened to him and to people like him.
But then, I didn't hear any straight talk about the reserves themselves, and I'm going to go way out of limb here, but, you know, that's what you do, I think, if you're You want to address these things with some amount of content.
Most of the reserves that I'm familiar with are like small towns.
That's the closest analogy.
And if you go out west, for example, and you see this all across North America, all the small towns have dried up.
All of them.
There's hundreds and hundreds of basically abandoned small towns in Saskatchewan.
And so what's the long-term economic viability of these small town reserves?
Is anybody ever going to talk about that?
Because there is none, as far as I can tell, even hypothetically.
How is it possible for that system and structure to survive?
And if we don't address that in something like a national debate that's focused on reconciliation, which I think is the elephant under the rug, it's like, why in the world should we assume that we're any more honest than our ancestors who we're continually apologizing for?
Yeah.
Am I way out of line there?
Well, again, you've hit climate change.
This is not false.
This is actually the case.
Climate change is one of the sacred topics for 85% of journalists, politics, consultant class.
You're not supposed to go to the center of the thing.
In other words, why would you want to close down Alberta, but you won't criticize China.
That's logic.
In the case of the indigenous issues in this country, I don't have Anything like the amount of knowledge you have, and even if yours is scant.
But I do know this, that if you wish to talk about Indigenous affairs, there's already a structure.
There's already a set of attitudes.
You're only supposed to speak in a certain direction.
And especially if you're a white journalist who wants to comment on it at all.
This is already surrounded by a number of media taboos.
You can't put topics off limits and then demand the change.
Again, it's like the global warming debate.
I would like to see, finally, some people of genuine disinterest, high intelligence and perfect credentials with no ties to anything else but science.
Give me a reading.
In the case of the indigenous reserves, it's the same and it's a parallel.
In Newfoundland, we have the small outboards collapsing because the economy is dying over the last five or six years.
There is no way in the world That these towns that lasted for so, so long can live any longer.
Now you're not allowed precisely to ask that question in the current context, and so the debate is not only crippled, it's stultified from the beginning.
So what that means is that the whole reconciliation exercise is going to end up being nothing but another pack of lies.
Well, they remember, again, the tremendous inquiry, missing women and murdered women.
That was supposed to be a great opening of the doors and a final effort.
It becomes something else.
We had the tremendous parliamentary apology when Harper was prime minister, in which the leaders, women and male, of the aboriginal were in the House of Commons.
That was supposed to be a significant constitutional moment.
It meant that, okay, we can abandon the structure of hostility under which we're talking, and now we can bend our minds to the future and to the actual fixing of the physical things that need to be done.
However, as soon as the great glory and the ceremony was over, and it was a formal parliamentary apology, we're still having apologies.
Most people wake up and see that this is just form, this is genuflection in the church.
This is another one of those rites that we go through, not substance.
Send 200 civil servants with engineering degrees to these places if it's just a water problem.
And I cannot believe in the 21st century you can't get the wells clean or the streams dry.
And yet, we talked about that in 2015 and you're talking about it in 2021.
So when you hear reconciliation or a new understanding or a land acknowledgement, that's the kind of spiritual tax that you pay because you don't do anything.
And so do you think that my analogy between the at least a sizable proportion of the reserves and the doomed small towns across Canada, does that seem accurate to you?
Then there's the problem of endemic alcohol abuse, which no one will talk about.
And I'm not pointing a finger and blaming.
I mean, not at all.
And I come from an isolated northern community, and I know what that's like.
But It's like we are children.
We can't have a serious discussion about these things.
It's like, okay, there's a terrible problem.
Yeah, well, terrible problems are really hard to talk about.
Just exactly what is the problem?
This is the mark of current culture and civilization and media.
You have crime problems in Toronto.
What's the solution?
Ban long rifles.
We know it's not ban long rifles.
We know that there are thugs with handguns that they get from the states.
They are in specific quarters of these cities.
We have had this gun argument unrelated to the actual facts of the case, because if you cite those facts specifically, you will be hounded with all sorts of the new anathemas of racism and whatever the particular cause is.
If you bring up the actual items that give great disparity to native peoples in this country, all of them, Then you will be under attack for something else again.
It is a mark of Western discussions and Western politics that we have an automatic and silent cancellation mechanism.
Here's the amount of intelligent remark which will permit in an open room.
And by the way, so many people who make these little discussions and have these grand conferences They know they are empty from the beginning because they know they're not saying 90% of what they know.
And it goes to other issues too.
It goes to teaching in school, the trans movement, the idea that this special services guy yesterday, 180 pounds or something, strangled some woman, and no one will stand up and say, You know something?
You're mad.
You're crazy.
And the idea we let a special service...
And you're sadistic.
And you're sadistic.
And you're narcissistic.
And you're a man who just beat the hell out of a woman and is bragging about it.
Yeah, but it's an index.
I'm going to use an exact...
It's an index of this curious...
Bending of the mind, the shutting down of three quarters of the processes of the mind to accommodate woke culture, political correctness.
In the last interview we had, the more calm one, we were throwing away the intellectual credibility and integrity of Western thought.
And it's finally rolled into politics.
You can see what's happening.
Just watch as that continues to deteriorate.
We're going to have debates structured like the one we just saw, where we cede the territory right from the beginning and we don't even notice.
And Aaron O'Toole, if he were a real opposition leader, instead of going along with the group here, he would have stood in the middle when his turn came and said, I've seen the debate function and I've seen the list of questions here.
They're all off.
You're not dealing with the central ones.
I disagree with the format.
I think make the case, challenge the assumptions, but no, no.
I've seen this time and time again with conservatives.
They don't notice when they've been beat to begin with.
And they won't object.
And a lot of it's terror.
A lot of it's terror about being singled out and mobbed.
Like this this this incursion of morality into the political domain is really hard on people because it is hard to be Singled out and mobbed and it is hard to be pillory for your immorality just because you're trying to think but it's also subtle You know it took me till halfway through the debate till I realized that oh I see this was lost on On the center and on the right, this was lost to begin with.
Of course it was.
Who cares what anyone says?
It's like you already agreed to the terms of the conversation.
And a bigger point about the debate is something else.
As I've noted, there were two in Quebec and one in...
We are a democracy of 40 million people, 10 provinces, vast landscape, and there are, in my judgment, there are five separate mentalities, or maybe six in Canada, the Atlantic region, Quebec has its own, obviously, Ontario, do you understand, the prairies, BC is its own place, the north and other things.
There's no possible reason in a national election that you don't at least visit five of the separate regions and have the local people in those regions, but as an audience and as a panel, tell the politicians what the issues are.
Instead, we've shrunk it to one little tiny thing with a gallery of, in most cases, the usual journalists.
We cram four and five leaders, three of whom shouldn't be there, The debate itself was nugatory.
It was odious.
It was empty.
We need much more.
We're allowing politics to be managed by the politicians and the journalists.
And this election is one of the most cynical I've ever seen.
So let's talk about the leaders, let's say.
Okay.
Also about the sort of stunning absence of Maxime Bernier.
The person that I was most impressed with, I would say, in the debate, all things considered, was probably the Bloc Québécois leader, much as I hate to say that.
I mean, there's lots of his policies that I find rather...
Well, let's say not in the best interests of Canadians per se, but I mean, he makes no bones about that.
But he was the only person who I saw in that whole debate sort of hold his own against the moralizing of the journalists.
Yeah.
And also who dared, at least upon occasion, to say what he thought.
And the rest of it seemed to me to be an exercise in not stepping on a mine, something like that.
An exercise in not saying anything that was going to cause trouble.
You've got it.
So, Annamie Paul, it was strange that she had, it's a strange thing to see her discuss on equal footing in some sense with the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition.
That's a very strange thing because she doesn't have the political support to justify that.
And I know that's hard.
It's hard to figure out who to include in these leadership debates or not, but That was another example of ceding the territory in a terrible way.
Well, there's two things I'd like to say about that particular one.
Green is another religious subject, so it's a lot harder from the point of view of correctness to keep out a green person.
But the biggest objection to Annamie Paul, not on our person at all, is that we've seen in the last two and three and four weeks that her green party is essentially a live grenade, busily destroying itself.
And the idea that the leader of a party that is obviously in self-dissolution gets to stand up in the full leader's debate, that's comical.
She's a nice woman, she's very smart, a couple of really good lines.
What is this party of two, of which she is not the one in the House of Parliament, eating up the time on the stage?
We should have debate between leaders who can become prime ministers and secondary debates among those who aspire, and they should be Canada-wide, and they should not be limited to one English debate with about 400 people on stage.
This is really a folly.
And as far as you get, she's there, but Elizabeth May is still, whatever she's doing, she is still the Green Party, and the Green Party is now more anti-Israel than it is pro-earth.
So, tell me, let's, okay, do you have anything else that you wanted to say about the debate?
We really, really haven't talked anything about the content, eh?
About what the various leaders actually had to say on each of these topics.
Well, just one more thing on the debate.
In Canada over the years, we have allowed the actions of politics to become so professionalized.
It used to be an amateur effort and you'd round up your buddies and you'd do all this campaigning even a year in advance.
Now you have the consultants, the strategy teams, the experts hired from down in the States.
You've got people who make a living.
Just running political campaigns.
You have the TV consultants and the fashion consultants.
And it's all some great, glorious meeting of these very brilliant and yuppie fixers.
But as far as going out and saying, oh, I think I'll take three, Justin Oriano to, really, I'll drop the goddamn entourage.
I go up and I'm going to sit in this reserve for a week and a half.
I'm going to actually look and see what it's like, or I'll go over to Northern BC and see what those guys are at.
How many cabinet meetings have been held in Fort McMurray?
To actually hear the views of those who are under the assail of their principal policy.
You can go to Paris, you can go to Rio de Janeiro, you can go to Glasgow in November, but you can't visit the site where the people, the people are working.
It's become professionalized.
It's become a hobby.
It's become a game.
And the calling of this election, there was no motive for it.
There was no national crisis.
There was no specific occasion on which Mr.
Trudeau looked around in the House of Commons and said, this house can no longer function.
I must call it.
And here is the issue.
So the debates are all part of that plastic effort to make it look real.
It's a game played by the people within it.
And people I talk to generally, people you meet on streets and everywhere else, they have no time for this at all.
They really say, get it over with.
What are we doing here?
And it's in the middle of the pandemic at the time that Afghanistan is being overrun by militant fundamentalists.
I think it's so sad.
So let me ask you, you've been watching politics for a very, very long time and thinking about it for a very, very long time.
And so when you look at Justin Trudeau, I'd like your opinion about Trudeau and who he is and what he's done over the last couple of years.
And I'd like you to maybe contrast him with other leaders that Canada's had that you've been relatively intimately familiar with, or at least compared to most people.
So what do you see?
Let's see in the case of Mr.
Trudeau, and I'll keep it as mild as I can, the capacity is not there.
If you contrast him with Stephen Harper or his father, And I did have a couple of lengthy sessions with Pierre Trudeau.
And it's not to be mean, but the contrast between the capacity, the range of knowledge, depth of personality, is really something else.
In the case of Mr.
Harper, the contrast there is, and just a side note, I do not understand why Harper has become such a symbol of a venomous bear.
He's the sauron.
He's a very intelligent, quite diligent, introspective, and concerned about actually doing the task.
I think Harper was one of the most modest in terms of public display.
But when we come now to the current situation, the preparation is not there.
It was a kind of idle life.
I found the episode in India more...
More distressing than probably most other people.
It wasn't the fact that he adopted the costume of a foreign country, and he's the prime minister of this one, is that it was done for so long.
It was five or six days in which a prime minister of a great first world country visiting another of deep civilization conducts this play with his whole family.
And then we come to this present moment.
He makes these commitments.
He's a feminist.
Well, he chases the three strongest women in his cabinet.
One is a white doctor, one is an aboriginal lawyer, one is one of the most dynamic black candidates that we have ever seen.
He hits all the bases that he's supposed to admire.
Every single major theme, diversity, respect, equality, inclusion, women, feminism, Every single one of these have been tumbled down.
And you said to contrast with others?
I could contrast with some premiers.
I know that Joey Smallwood in his day became hectic, careless, and scandal-ridden.
I know other premiers were as well.
If I were to contrast it with Peter Lougheed, Lougheed had the gravitas that when he spoke, there's something, yeah, that's a very good point.
In this particular period of the pandemic, the economic distresses that are going through hundreds of thousands of houses in this country, and the shadow of Afghanistan, Our leaders should have a podium some once or twice to come out and speak as the Prime Minister of Canada, not the Liberal Council, not that.
Canada, here's where we are.
People of Canada, I know what you are enduring.
Not sloganizing, we got your back and I'm spending this money so you...
No.
Here's the serious situation, and there are bigger things coming up, maybe harder things.
Maybe the next two years won't be building back better.
Maybe we're going to be facing a period of real urgency and demanding more work than we've ever done, and we may have to cut back.
But I want you to know I'm here, and I'm not here to divide you.
And I'd like to take the pressure off of Alberta.
If it's at all possible, stop picking on one province.
Where's the leader doing that?
Mr.
O'Toole, by the way, I'm saying all that about Mr.
Trudeau.
Mr.
O'Toole is a quieter man, and I think he probably has more depth in terms of character because of what he was.
But he seems to me to be playing a political game.
Where's the strong north core?
I think that he's been handled into a liberal, essentially, into basically adopting the liberal policy policy.
He's accepting the ethos that you don't offend.
Yes, yes.
And that's a bad thing, because you need spine, you need the integrity of someone.
I've actually thought about this, meaning the leader.
I've actually thought about this, and you know, it's going to be hard news for you folks, but this is what we're going to do now.
But this campaign so far, they've jumped from abortion to gun rights to the anti-vaxxers.
I'm skipping a couple.
They've tried out various little buttons to see if they can make the puppets dance, which tell me only one thing.
They do not have an issue.
They called it for nothing except they're either worried about the next two years and wanted better cover, Or because the polls told them they could get a majority.
In other words, it was internal.
It was of them.
It was of the politicians, not of the public.
I'm preaching at you.
So what made me skeptical about Trudeau to begin with, I'd like your opinion on this, is that It wasn't obvious to me that he had the preparation for the job by any stretch of the imagination.
It's a very hard job and it is a job that would be too hard for me.
I know that.
And so I'm not saying this as someone who thinks he could step in and do this properly.
It's a very stressful job and it's very complicated.
But I think that also means that you have to be very careful when you decide that you're the guy to do it.
If Mr.
Trudeau's last name had been anything other than Trudeau, he wouldn't have ever been the leader of the Liberal Party or the Prime Minister of Canada.
And it seems to me, it isn't clear to me how you'd have to think in order to think that that was actually okay.
Like, what do you have to think to believe that, oh, well, you know, I really don't know how to do this.
I'm not prepared for it.
I don't have the educational background or the experiential background.
But everyone knows my name.
I've got name brand recognition, man.
I've really got that.
And so it's okay if I'm Prime Minister.
It's like, actually, it's not okay.
Actually.
That's requiring a degree of introspection that I wouldn't anticipate.
But here's a real answer.
And it just doesn't relate just to him at all.
We've now entered this new world where the word celebrity has changed since the 1970s.
You know, where someone pumps up their rear end and becomes an international star.
People who exist only on the tinsel of celebrity.
Celebrity is fame without achievement, if you want to have a real definition.
Fame with nothing behind it.
And in this new world, if you have a name or if you're flashed on a screen or if you can get in Vogue magazine, You take the advantages that come with it.
And if that means a hundred million dollars to do a Netflix for dreary Megan and whatever his name is, or if I can wander into the political office for five years and I have my subordinates and friends take care of the problems.
I like the altitude and I like the exhibition.
And I like the fact that, you know, the world is going to be looking at me.
For the first year and a half, incidentally, it was difficult to determine whether he was going to end up in People magazine or foreign policy, but it was obviously People magazine.
I'm using an old reference.
Celebrity culture, modern culture is all over itself, giving positions and authority to those who wield them only for the status attached to them and not for the competence that they bring to the task.
Look at journalism.
Well, the question is, how is it that you justify that to yourself in your own mind?
Do you say something like, well, look, the Liberal Party came to me, and they did come to him, and maybe better the Liberals than anyone else, and I do have the name brand recognition.
I mean, what's the rationalization there?
And the other rationalization, and I pity them if they believe it, I pity them if they believe it.
Hardcore liberals, I'm not a liberal or a conservative in any formal sense.
Hardcore liberals, conservatives are looked down upon as Neanderthal, they're racist, they're Nazis.
Harper really is a demon.
Now, if you can believe that, you've either taken leave of your mental faculties, or they never visited in the first place.
But there are some liberals, and I adjust this one.
He said there before he was prime minister, He was in an interview in Quebec that, you know, if the policies of Stephen Harper were to continue in Canada, if Canada became the Canada of the Stephen Harper policies, then he would have to consider separation.
I don't know where he got that, but the idea that Stephen Harper was a malignant administrator of this country is worse than insult.
And then, because I'm so honorable, I would have to say, let's take Quebec out of Canada.
That's a delusion.
And even two days ago, when he's asked other questions about vaccinations and stuff, poor old Stephen Harper must be very tired getting hauled out of the closet every six days by Justin Trudeau.
No, it's the carelessness of the modern age.
People take on tasks they're not acquainted with.
Liberals are the savior of the world.
Oh yes, go back to the very beginning.
I'm also one, I will be leading the salvation of the world because I will tackle global climate change.
Religious messianism is a well-known phenomenon.
You got a slight instance of it here transferred to politics.
It's not the introspection you're looking for.
The cloud comes down.
He said it to his wife Sophie, I was put on earth for this.
That's a bad attitude to have if you're entering politics.
It really is.
So, we've done a lot of complaining, you and me.
Oh, I'm great complaining.
Yeah, yeah.
And we're fortunate to be in the position where we can complain, and we can complain freely.
So far.
So far.
Where do we go from here?
Where do Canadians go from here?
What do we do with this election?
And what do you see our way forward properly?
I know they're naive questions in some sense, I suppose.
But they are the questions.
The fact is, of course, the election is only the illustration of the deeper problem.
And the deeper problem, and I'm not being pretentious, is what we talked about for a considerable time in the previous interview.
This is just an instance of an ethic, of a style.
It's an instance of the new Western attitude, where you self-derogate, where you attempt to cripple your own advantage, when you take on guilts that are not your own, when you assume virtues, and you assume that the assumption of the virtues is the performance of the virtues, which is not true.
In other words, it's idle in that sense, it's vain in another, and we've allowed our intellectual capacity To greatly devolve.
We've outlawed honest, strong argument.
And instead we traffic, and this is many from the left, we traffic in ugly insults and horrible terms and chase people off platforms.
This is the 21st century in a Western democracy.
As we said in the last one.
So, how do you think that in such a context, when the schools are running mad with their cult-favorite causes rather than doing the job of teaching literature and music and mathematics, when the universities have allowed great streams of third-rate and fourth-rate fallacious thought wander in, how do you think politics would be spared from this?
We are a harvest of things past.
Where we go from here?
I suppose It is feeble.
You just keep pointing that we must return to some solid sanity, some solid rationality.
We must respect the virtues that got us where we are.
We must be grateful to the people who went before us, and we must become serious again.
I think by our standing of living and the fact that we've been secure since the Second World War in the main sense, and we have not had the privations of our pioneer fathers or mothers, has made us careless and has allowed to evaporate the very central characteristics of personal character that brought us here.
Maybe hurt will remind us that we have to relearn The very things that gave us what now we seem to be abandoning.
Sorry to go on.
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