Dr. Brian Lee Crowley contrasts "designers," who push top-down societal overhauls (e.g., replacing oil and gas with government-driven green schemes or mandating politically correct language like "indigenous"), with "gardeners," who value organic growth—such as U.S. fracking’s unintended emissions cuts or dispersed expertise in cities where cars outperform 80% empty transit. His book critiques bureaucratic fixes, from urban transit to housing (60% of costs tied to land-use restrictions), arguing they stifle progress by ignoring practical Canadian experience. Founded a decade ago, the McDonald Laurier Institute champions Indigenous economic integration and balanced policies over expert-led redesigns, exposing a systemic bias where 10 liberal books overshadow every conservative one. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I have a future interview with Dr. Brian Lee Crowley from the McDonald Laurier Institute.
We're talking about his new book called Gardeners versus Designers.
I'd like to encourage you to become a Rebel News Plus subscriber.
Just go to RebelNews.com and click subscribe.
It's eight bucks a month.
You get the video version of this podcast, plus weekly podcasts from Sheila Gunread and David Menzies.
All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, who would make a better prime minister, a gardener or a designer?
A feature interview with Dr. Brian Lee Crowley, the managing director of the McDonald Laurier Institute.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say is government, but why I publish them is because it's my bloody right to do so.
There are a number of interesting think tanks in Canada that could be loosely called on the right, a little bit conservative or not liberal.
One of them is called the McDonald Laurier Institute.
They have some interesting scholars over there, including our friend, Dr. Charles Burton, the great China expert.
Well, the managing director of the McDonald Laurier Institute is Dr. Brian Lee Crowley, and he has a new book out called Gardeners versus Designers.
I had the pleasure of sitting down with him for about half an hour to talk about the book.
Here's that interview.
And joining us now via Skype from the McDonnell-Laurier Institute in Ottawa is Dr. Brian Lee Crowley.
Dr. Crowley, what a pleasure.
The book is called Gardeners versus Designers, understanding the great fault line in Canadian politics.
If I had to choose between those two things, I like the sound of being a gardener, but you tell me what it means politically.
Well, look, Ezra, you know, the book arises from a realization that I had once when I was listening to, I don't know if it was the prime minister or one of these great and good people who was telling me yet again what a terrible place Canada was, that it was full of racism and homophobia and sexism, and we really had much to be ashamed of and actually very little to be proud of.
And I thought, you know, that's not my experience of Canada.
And it's not the experience of Canada, the vast majority of people I know.
And it came to me that what was going on was there was a tremendous effort to delegitimize Canada, the Canada that we have grown up with, the Canada that we have helped to create, so that they could replace it with something else.
They are the designers of the book's title.
They think that Canada is a problem to be fixed, and they have the blueprint for fixing it.
And I'm one of those people who thinks that Canada isn't something that was imposed from the top down.
It's not created by experts.
It's not created by politicians who have power at any particular moment.
Canada has been created by the efforts of Canadians trying to live their best lives.
And their experience is embedded in our institutions.
And every time they try and replace them with something they have designed, they make our lives worse, not better.
So in the analogy, the gardener is someone who just slowly pulls out weeds, maybe plants something new, but doesn't just raise everything down with a lawnmower.
Whereas a designer might get rid of everything and put in like a concrete block or something.
I mean, is one of the differences incremental, organic, slow change versus ta-da, here's your new world.
Is that the difference?
Well, that's part of it, Ezra.
But, you know, I think an important part is the realization that every gardener comes to, that they are not in charge of the garden.
The garden unfolds under its own energy.
And there are many things about the garden the gardener doesn't control.
You know, you can't make plants grow faster by pulling on them.
Okay.
So it's a philosophy of humility, which says gardeners are important.
You know, you don't have a garden unless there's somebody, as you say, who clears away the weeds and so on.
But the garden has its own energy.
Every plant has its own plan for itself.
It unfolds under its own energy and its own intentions.
And the designer doesn't see Canada or any society like a garden.
They see it like a machine.
They think somebody must have created this.
Somebody must have designed it.
It was designed to do certain things.
And if I pull this lever, I can make it do whatever I want.
If I twiddle this dial, I can make it go faster.
If I hit the brake, it'll make it go slower.
And they think they are in charge of everything, that everything responds to their will.
And the idea behind this gardener versus designer distinction is that, you know, actually, Canadians have their own plans.
They have their own intentions.
They have their own ideas about how to live.
And when designers come along and say, oh, you know, Canada is a problem to be fixed.
And the things that you think are good about Canada, you're completely wrong about that.
We're going to replace them.
And we're going to make Canada in our image.
The only way they can make Canada in their image is by eliminating us from the equation.
I love this analogy, and I'm thinking of so many things that would fit.
I mean, how a city evolves.
I mean, some of the most beautiful cities in the world evolve over centuries.
I think of Paris.
I mean, there is some design, but I mean, you look at soulless design from scratch cities like Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, versus, let's say, London.
And you just say, well, which one grew up generation by generation versus was a planned city?
But let's bring it back to what I love the gardener versus designer theme, but let's talk about the political stuff that you want to look at through this lens.
And I'm just going to start throwing subjects at you.
And you tell me how this gardener versus designer dichotomy works on these issues.
So let's start with the economy.
I presume a designer would have a centrally planned economy and a gardener would be more laissez-faire.
Am I right?
Well, yes.
I mean, in economic terms, you know, the prime minister thinks that you grow an economy from the heart outwards, to use his expression, right?
But remember, it's his heart.
It's his heart.
And he thinks that an economy is something it is designed.
You make it.
And I'm here to tell you that the economy of Canada is composed of many millions of people trying to live their best lives, putting their knowledge to work to benefit other Canadians through exchange in the marketplace.
And the idea that this can somehow, we can excise, let's say, the oil and gas industry, because that's bad.
We know we don't want that.
Whereas we want the green economy, and so we're going to encourage that.
You know, this idea that somehow there can be in some bureaucrat's mind in Ottawa a plan about how to fix the economy, because God knows there are many things about it that we don't want.
I think that the only way you can do that, let's take the oil and gas industry, the only way you can get rid of the oil and gas industry is by frustrating the plans of hundreds of thousands of Canadians.
You frustrate their ability to make what they know and what they can do available to other Canadians.
And I think this is a completely wrong notion of how to use political power.
The point of political power is not to recreate society in the image of the people with power, but to use power to cultivate the garden so that everyone's experience, everyone's knowledge is valued and given a chance to produce what it is capable of producing.
I mean, I've always been a critic of green energy because I've not seen in all of my travels a wind farm that exists without some sort of government subsidy or mandate.
In fact, what I often note is that as soon as those subsidies are over, the wind turbines fall into disrepair because they're not valuable in and of themselves.
They're only valuable if they're part of some master design that involves a lot of government spending.
I wonder if there's any green scheme that can work by design.
I note that the United States has actually reduced its greenhouse gas emissions, which I know comes as a shock to a lot of people, but it was by accident almost.
It was because they used fracking for natural gas that replaced coal.
That was not anyone's climate design.
Maybe that's just lots of organic decisions by different people that had a positive outcome.
You know, fracking by accident lowered carbon dioxide emissions in a way that I don't think any designs in Canada have done.
Is that a good analogy?
I think that's a very good way of thinking about it, Ezra.
You see, an important part of the book is talking about what people at the top know.
Because the whole argument for letting people at the top design society, replace oil and gas with the green economy, or any one of a thousand things we could talk about.
The whole argument behind that is they know better than we do.
They have some knowledge that is not available to us.
And the whole argument of the book is actually it's completely reversed.
That all the knowledge that exists in Canada exists in the minds of all Canadians.
But people at the top don't have an overview of all that knowledge.
They don't know everything that's in the mind of every Canadian.
They don't know what petroleum engineers know.
They don't know what people who are creating green innovations in private companies know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So when we let people at the top redesign our institutions, redesign our society, tell us how to live, we aren't more successful as a society.
We're less successful because we're now acting on less knowledge than when we let people pursue their own knowledge, their own interests, their own objectives.
And so to your exact example, the idea that somehow governments are going to save us from climate change, from greenhouse gases and all this sort of stuff, I think is completely wrong.
What they can do, and I think this is a gardener thing.
They can create incentives that will accelerate the creation of new knowledge, the discovery of new ideas that will help us reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
But the idea that the people at the top know enough to redesign society to get rid of carbon emissions, I think is completely fanciful.
You know, you made me think there when you talked about how knowledge is distributed, and each of us knows a little bit about our block, our neighborhood, our world.
You made me think of a very short book.
I think it was Frederick Bastietta, who basically said, How can we feed, and I mentioned Paris before, but he was French.
He said, How do we feed Paris?
No one's in charge of it.
No one's in charge of getting bread to every house, every corner store.
Oh my God, we're all going to starve.
The irony is, if it was a command and control economy, you would have people starving because no one person knows what a million Parisians know.
I need two orders of two loaves of bread, I need four.
So you disperse that knowledge, and every baker and every corner store knows a little bit, and together you have spontaneous order as opposed to planned chaos.
You just made me think of, I mean, imagine if you had one designer saying, I know better how to distribute bread to every house and restaurant in Paris.
It's terrifying to think of what a designer fails to do because of their hubris.
Yes, well, you know, this is exactly the central argument of the book.
I say, look, you know, these people at the top who think they're so smart, you know, they've got fancy PhDs, they've been to big universities, maybe they've worked for McKinsey or the Bank of England for all I know.
And they say, you know, look, we have an overview of society.
We know more than anybody else.
We are entitled to tell you how to live and how to organize your life and how to contribute to the economy and where you should live and how you should get to work and all these things where they're constantly wagging their finger at us and telling us, I know better than you do.
The whole argument of the book is, you know, this knowledge that they have is mostly statistical knowledge.
And what statistical knowledge?
Statistical knowledge takes, you know, a picture of you and me and every other individual and strips away everything that makes us an individual, strips away everything unique about us.
But our knowledge is unique.
As you've just said, Ezra, you know, we know a little bit about our local block, about our neighbors, about the car we drive, about where we want to work, about what knowledge we have that other people might value.
You know, some people are engineers and some people are lawyers.
It's an immensely complex quilt of knowledge which is dispersed across the country.
And the statistics that give these guys at the top the illusion that they can design society have had everything that makes us human taken out of them.
And we have to have confidence in our ability to understand our own lives.
And we have to resist these guys who think that because they've got these fancy PhDs and have worked for big international organizations, that they can tell us how to live.
They don't know enough.
Yeah.
You know, sometimes jargon is a giveaway.
Why Deliverology Fails00:04:12
I did a show the other day about the word deliverology that was actually all in vogue in Ottawa for a few years under Trudeau.
They brought in some expert in deliverology.
When a guy starts talking like that, hold on to your wallet.
And I think that he would definitely fall into the designer rather than the gardener camp.
Now, listen, I've been having too much fun sort of daydreaming about the different categorizations.
I love it, gardeners versus designers.
But let's get back to your book.
Tell me some of the topics you cover in the various chapters of your book.
So I'm going to try and hush up now and listen, go through it for our viewers, make the case.
I'm going to, I always say to our viewers: if there is a book from our point of view published in Canada, we owe it to ourselves not just to read it, to learn about the freedom-oriented, conservative-oriented point of view, but frankly, to support a guy who's going to write a conservative book.
Because every conservative book, I can assure you, there are 10 liberal books on the market.
So, I always make a point of saying, buy the book to read it, but buy the book to show support for the guy who's doing it.
We need conservative movies, we need conservative art, we need conservative books.
So, give me a sales pitch.
Tell me what's in the book so that we can, as rebels, support it.
Well, Ezra, I guess the best way to think about it is: you know, there's this huge effort underway, which I mentioned earlier, in Canada, to delegitimize our past, to tell us that where we've come from is a terrible place.
And it suddenly occurred to me that the only reason they can get away with that is because we have forgotten how to understand the great things that made Canada and that made Canada great.
You know, why is it that we are one of the societies in the world with the highest share of people born in another country?
I'm here to tell you, and I speak to a lot of audiences of immigrants, I'm here to tell you that they tell me all the time that what brought us to Canada was freedom.
What brought us to Canada was the realization.
We had lots of other countries we could have gone to, but we didn't go to those other countries.
We came to Canada because Canada is a great society, and we know that even though we may not, you know, because we don't speak English perfectly, we don't have all the qualifications that we might have had if we'd been born here, but our children, our children will have those things, and our children will succeed in Canada in a way they couldn't in any other country.
And it occurred to me that when these people in charge in Ottawa are constantly telling us that we're an awful society and we've got to be fixed and they don't know how to fix us, that we on the other side don't have a good understanding of why the institutions that we have created throughout the centuries of Canada's existence and the colonies beforehand,
we don't have a good sense of why those institutions work.
So, I set out to explain why it is that gardening is superior to designing.
And I talked about all the reasons why people at the top don't know anything compared to what you and I know about our lives.
And then I moved on to talk about how it is that we can defend those institutions that have grown up, the common law, language, federalism, all the things that we have come to value so much that make Canada what it is.
And I then apply those ideas.
I apply them to the environment.
I apply them to life in the city.
I apply them to the healthcare system and various other policy issues that the designers are constantly trying to impose solutions on.
Why Cities Fail Transit00:04:04
I talk about why urban transit is vastly inferior to the car, for example.
Talk about why, you know, when the head of the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation says, oh, houses have become terribly expensive, and Canadians are getting too indebted, and the solution, therefore, is to tell Canadians to stop buying houses.
And I say, what?
No, the solution is, you know, designers have made land so expensive that it's almost impossible for Canadians to buy a house.
60% now, according to a study that I quote in my book, 60% of the cost of a house is because of obstructive land controls that prevent land from being released for housing.
And so, you know, when the designers say, oh, we've identified a problem, Canadians are too indebted.
Their solution, let's make Canadians change their behavior.
My answer is, no, let's make the designers change their behavior so that they stop obstructing what it is that Canadians want.
I think you mentioned public transit there.
That's something that always gets me because I think there are some people who are almost religiously dedicated to people getting out of cars and either driving their bikes in a country that's the second largest country in the world and one of the coldest countries of the world, snow on the ground, you know, a third of the year.
That's a bizarre answer right there.
But to get into mass transit, I never see any of the fancy pants riding mass transit.
Even Jack Layton would show up on his bike and then he would put the bike in the trunk of the limbo that drove him around.
But boy, there's an obsession, hate the car, love expensive mass transit.
And I drive around.
And other than for a brief moment during rush hour, all the buses and subways I see, here in Toronto at least, are 80% empty.
Why do you think it is that people are not using mass transit the way the designers want them to?
Oh, there's a very simple answer to that, Ezra.
You know, in the United States, they've studied this quite a lot.
They asked the question: okay, how many jobs can you reach by car from the average house within 30 minutes?
And how many jobs can you reach by transit within 30 minutes?
And if you look at New York City, which has got the most developed transit system in North America, the answer is you get to six times as many jobs by car as you do by transit within 30 minutes from the average home.
And in most cities, it's infinitely more jobs than that.
New York is the most transit-friendly example.
And this is the purpose of cities.
This is what cities do.
Cities bring people together so that many jobs can be done in one place.
And the value, people can specialize so that they get the greatest value out of what they know.
And any city that comes along and says, well, we're going to cut your access to jobs by, in the case of New York City, by five-sixths so that you'll take transit instead of your car, is making a decision to impoverish the people who live in that city.
And I completely agree with you that the average person who says people should get out of their car and onto transit, what they really mean is they want the person in the car in front of them to get out of their car, get out of the way, so that they can get to work faster by car.
And, you know, this idea that all the jobs are downtown, and so we build a transit system that takes people downtown and takes them back out the other way completely ignores the fact that increasingly jobs are leaving the city center just as much as people are leaving the city center.
And transit just won't get you to these jobs.
National Prosperity Insights00:07:45
Well, there's a lot of economic things to talk about, but one of the things when I'm thinking about designers versus gardeners, and you've referred several times to experts and PhDs and things like that.
And I mean, I think there's a class divide sometimes.
I mean, who is supposed to take transit?
I don't see a lot of busy lawyers and bankers and politicians on mass transit.
But the area where the designers have one way of thinking and the rest of us have another way of thinking, the area where I think that's most stark is on what you're allowed to say, what you're allowed to think.
And I mean regulation and censorship of words and ideas.
And even, I mean, I remember when the word Indian went out of vogue, so aboriginal came in.
But now you can't say aboriginal, you have to say indigenous.
And that's fine.
I'll keep moving the words along.
My friend of mine who's an Indian chief, he wears Indian brand clothing.
He's not upset by it, but fine.
So let's say the word indigenous, because we're all exquisitely fashionable and there's no need to fight over it.
But if there's a regular guy who's not in the world of words, who doesn't, you know, at great length deliberate over every precise phrase, and he says a joke that's politically incorrect or he doesn't properly refer to a transgender person, the way they are depersoned and jumped on and de-platformed,
I've never seen the kind of divide between designers and gardeners as stark as in the battle for what you can say and think.
And it's very, very much the PhDs versus, let's say, blue-collar folks who don't share those same sentiments.
What do you have to say about designing versus gardening words and thoughts?
Well, look, you know, Ezra, this is all part of that larger effort that I talked about, which is delegitimizing where we came from.
You know, not only are our institutions rotten, not only is the law nasty, not only are Canadians racist and homophobic and genocidal maniacs, apparently, but our language is just stuffed with nasty things that have to be extirpated so that we can be politically correct and live according to the standards of the designers.
They want to get rid of all this stuff they didn't make up themselves.
And I have to tell you that because I'm of the view that designers not only aren't superior intellectually to us, but they know less about our lives than we know about our own life.
You know, the idea that they should be telling us what to think and what we should be able to say is an effort to make society stupider.
You know, they think that if we act on the knowledge of these people at the top, we'll be a brilliant society.
We'll have super clusters of innovation and all this stuff that they talk about all the time.
I think on the contrary, what they're trying to do is they are trying to dumb society down to their level.
And we must resist them at every opportunity because what is in our minds is the greatest natural resource that Canada has.
And we must never allow these ignorant experts at the top who happen to have at the moment political power to tell us that the way we live is not acceptable.
You know, I was thinking of the book 1984, and one of the themes in that book is that the entire language needed to be redesigned.
They called it new speak.
They wanted to eliminate all sorts of thoughts that were a little too free.
And imagine designing an entire language so that you could limit or eliminate bad thoughts.
Well, listen, what an interesting conversation.
I thank you so much.
We've been talking with Dr. Brian Lee Crowley, who's the managing director of the McDonald Laurier Institute.
Folks, I encourage you to check them out at McDonaldLaurier.ca.
We have a link on this page where you can buy the book called Gardeners versus Designers.
Dr. Crowley, before we go, give us just a one minute on the McDonald Laurier Institute.
Of course, I follow all your stuff.
I'm on your email list.
We love Dr. Charles Burton, perhaps the finest mind on Canada-China relations in the country.
Give us one minute on what you guys do and what your plans are for the year ahead.
Oh, thanks very much for asking, Ezra.
I created the McDonald Laurie Institute 10 years ago.
We're celebrating our 10th anniversary.
I thought there was a real hole in Canada's democratic infrastructure in that we didn't have a national think tank in the national capital, Ottawa, talking about national issues to national policymakers, the national media, and the national electorate.
So I set out to create that institution.
The McDonald Lurie Institute is the result.
We spend a lot of time talking about three things.
We talk about national prosperity and how it can be created.
We talk about national security.
That's everything about how to keep Canadians safe, whether it's from foreign enemies or from internal disruption.
And we spend a lot of time talking about foreign relations, our relationship with the United States, NATO, Russia, the Indo-Pacific, China, which we're huge on China and the Middle East, of course.
We have a huge amount of work, for instance, on Aboriginal or Indigenous Canada and the natural resource economy.
We're one of the biggest voices arguing that Indigenous people should be given economic opportunity as the best way to help them enter the mainstream of Canadian society while preserving their own way of life.
So we have a lot of work that I think might well be of interest to your listeners.
Well, I'm sure it will be.
And I would like to close how I open, which is it's very interesting.
You've got all the gears turning in my head about gardening versus designing.
I like using that approach to things.
The book is called Gardeners versus Designers, Understanding the Great Fault Lying in Canadian Politics.
We've been talking with its author these past 30 minutes.
And I would like to encourage all my rebel viewers to get a copy of this book because it's such an interesting way of looking at the world.
And because, as I said before, if there is someone who's going to write a book from our point of view, surely it behooves us to support it.
And I will certainly be buying a copy on the Amazon link below myself.
Dr. Crowley, great to see you.
Hope we can have you back on the show.
Again, give my best regards to Dr. Burton, one of your great scholars, and good luck with the book.
Thank you so much, Ezra.
I look forward to talking to you again.
All right.
Stay with us.
More ahead.
What do you think about the book?
I spent too much time daydreaming about, well, who's a designer?
Who's a gardener?
How does that apply to, you know, everything, including how to handle a pandemic?
Well, that's the book, and we have a link below.
I'm going to get a copy of it and read it through.
I want to support conservative books, and I hope you do too.