The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 507. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin

Episode Date: December 19, 2024

Jordan Peterson sits down with journalist and author Terry Glavin. They discuss the ongoing circus of Justin Trudeau’s government and the shocking rise of anti-Semitism across Canada.Terry Glavin is a journalist, author of seven books & co-author of three. Assignments in recent years have taken Glavin to Afghanistan, Israel, the Russian Far East, the Eastern Himalayas, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Jordan, Geneva, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Central America. His books have been published in Canada, Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom. More than a dozen literary & journalism awards.This episode was filmed on December 17th, 2024. | Links | For Terry Glavin Substack https://therealstory.substack.com/ In the National Post https://nationalpost.com/author/tglavinnp/ "Justin Trudeau went all in on China a decade ago — and nothing can shake his resolve."https://nationalpost.com/opinion/terry-glavin-4 "Year of the Graves"https://nationalpost.com/opinion/the-year-of-the-graves-how-the-worlds-media-got-it-wrong-on-residential-school-graves  Books of relevance: “Come from the Shadows: The Long and Lonely Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan”https://www.amazon.com/s?k=glavin+come+from+the+shadows&i=stripbooks&crid=FQ8JTAN4X6NQ&sprefix=glavin+come+from+the+shadows%2Cstripbooks%2C150&ref=nb_sb_noss “The Lost and Left Behind: Stories from the Age of Extinctions”https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Left-Behind-Stories-Extinctions/dp/0863566065 “Amongst God's Own: The Enduring Legacy of St. Mary's Mission”https://www.amazon.ca/Amongst-Gods-Own-Enduring-Mission/dp/0968604617 

Hey everybody, I had a chance today to sit down and speak in person with Terry Glavin, who's one of Canada's premier journalists. I've been following his work for quite a long time, as has many Canadians, but there was a particular reason for talking to him now, and that was that he penned a piece for Barry Weiss and the Free Press. I've had dealings with Barry, complex dealings with Barry for quite a long time, and I read Terry's piece on the rise of anti-Semitism and all of the associated, what would you say, pathological, political, and quasi-political movements that accompany by necessity a rise in anti-Semitism. He detailed that out quite extensively in this Free Press

article, which is notable not only for its description of a relatively radically transformed Canada on the social front, on the political front, the ethical front, but also because Terry was pointing to a phenomenon, the rise of antisemitism in the West in general, after the atrocities of October 7th. And so not only is it a detailed analysis of something particular that's happening in a particular place and country, Canada, it's also a broader description of a movement that threatens the integrity of the West in a fundamental way, much more broadly. And so I was very interested in the article.

And when I read it, I thought I should really talk to Terry and maybe to Barry on my podcast. And four hours later, Barry Weiss wrote to me and said, you should talk to Terry Glavin about his recent article. And I thought, well, she thinks so too. And so, well, so we did that. And Terry probably made me more pessimistic about Canada's future than I was which is really saying something because after nine years of the Unmitigated catastrophic disaster of the Trudeau administration. I was already plenty pessimistic but he detailed out for example the pernicious effect of the Chinese Communist Party on

the political situation federally in Canada and I was less cognizant of the depth of that than I Party on the political situation federally in Canada, and I was less cognizant of the depth of that than I was after the podcast, so you can listen and weep if you're Canadian. But you know, again, that is also something with international implications, because it's not as if the Chinese are only producing their machinations to the detriment of the West in Canada. It's a threat to the West in general, and so Canada is a strange canary in the coal mine. We talked about, well, the pro-Hamas protesters in Canada, the absolute devastation of Canadian universities, the terror that Canadian Jews are feeling, tiny minority of Canada's population,

much smaller, by the way, than the Muslim population, which is relevant in this instance, given what's happened in Palestine. We talked about, well, our sorrow as older Canadians to see our country descend into this kind of 1930s-like, crystal-knocked demonstrating that characterized Toronto and Montreal and Vancouver and Calgary and things we never saw, never thought would happen in Canada, and the threats to Canada's integrity economically, politically and ethically in general.

Terry's Substack is available at The Real Story on the Substack site, and that's something that should be of substantial interest, well, not only to Canadians, but to people in general. So check that out. And well, welcome to a relatively dismal discussion of the situation in Canada and by implication the rest of the West. Well, as you know, I reached out to you for a variety of reasons, but the most compelling, I would say, and immediate was the article that you just wrote in the Free Press, which is, I would say, a rather damning screed,

all things considered, and I'm very interested in that particular issue, and I'm very much looking forward to discussing that with you and the Surrey State of Canada in general. So maybe you could start by just outlining what article I'm referring to and why you wrote it, and then let's go into the content of the article. Well, it is essentially an investigation of the state of anti-Semitism in Canada, and I spent quite a bit of time and effort on this, 16 in-depth interviews, maybe another 16 not so in-depth interviews, a lot of research, a lot of time and trouble trying to get this sorted. And I think part of Barry's motivation was that she was sort of vaguely, dimly aware that

something very, very unseemly was occurring in Canada. And we, she and I knew one another, we were kind of chummy. And I've covered, I've been sort of interested and concerned about anti-Semitism for about 20, 25 years now, actually, for reasons we might discuss. And so she said, well, it looks like Glavin's the guy to do this story. So I did this story. And it's about 6,700 words long. It's a very deep investigation and it has attracted a heck of a lot of attention.

Unfortunately, it doesn't make Canada look very good. I wrote this primarily for an American audience. I found Americans, God bless them, they haven't the faintest idea what's happening in Canada. They have an idea of Canada embedded in their brains and it's really hard to shake them from it. Canada is not the place that you will find in Michael Moore documentaries. Canada is not the place that you'll find in any aspect of American media actually, particularly over the last 10 years. It's changed. Funny coincidence that that wouldn't happen to line up with Trudeau's...

Strange how that works, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Trudeau's reign and economic catastrophe. Yeah, what is particularly concerning is that Canadian Jews are almost universally disconsolate, dejected, afraid, alienated, isolated, and they feel very strongly in the main that their government is not protecting them. That this… That's because their government isn't protecting them. Yeah, they might be onto something there. They might be, all right.

And I think, I mean, for people to understand this phenomenon, this thing that kind of bursts into the consciousness of most Canadians on the 8th of October, immediately after the Simchat Torah pogrom, the atrocities undertaken by Hamas in southern Israel at the Supernova Music Festival in the Kibbutzim around the Gaza envelope. Immediately afterwards, the event was celebrated, actually celebrated, and Hamas was praised, and this was characterized as a great act of heroic resistance against the illegitimate colonial settler state of Israel. And we saw this from one end of the country to the other, city after city, day after day,

week after week. And what we have seen in the year and a bit since that day, a 670% increase in anti-Semitic incidents. Give or take, it depends on how you add it up. It's, I mean, a lot of Jews don't even bother to call the cops anymore. There's no point. We've seen drive-by shootings at Jewish schools. We've seen synagogues firebombed. We've seen one synagogue in Toronto has been attacked half a dozen times in a few weeks. We've seen Jewish

businesses smashed, their windows smashed, Jewish neighborhoods throngs of anti-Zionist protesters in their neighborhoods. Anti-Zionist. Yeah. There is my own, I've come to the conclusion that there's very little distinction that you can draw between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. People will have all kinds of complaints about Israel. God bless them. The Israelis do. All kinds of complaints about Israel. God bless them. The Israelis do.

All kinds of complaints about their own government. And I think also it is complicated by, since October 7th, the very real deep anguish and suffering that is being endured by the people of Gaza. I think it's very, very, very important to notice this and to be able to talk about it. And one of the things that was really difficult for me to get at in my piece is that

that's almost an impossible conversation for ordinary, decent people to have. Because as soon as you begin to discuss various policy prescriptions that might be useful in getting aid and comfort to the suffering of the people of Gaza, the conversation is immediately taken over by a vast constituency of opinion that uses the suffering of Palestinians, sometimes imagined, but quite often real, to weaponize, weaponizing that suffering to the purpose of a deep and fanatical ideological commitment to the destruction of the state

of Israel and to driving the Jews into the sea. So whether you're a Jew or a Gentile, that conversation is almost impossible to have. And yeah, I think, you know, most people associate anti-Semitism, I think, with, you know, sort of skinheads, people who understand their lineage, you know, from the Nazis or whatever, that has not been a phenomenon in Canada for a long, long, long time. And there is something that has taken its place. Far and away, anti-Semitism in Canada is what you might call a left-wing phenomenon. I want to read something from your article, Kay, that's directly relevant to that.

It's from a section called, It Was Like a Dam Burst, and so this is right after October 7th. And these are comments by Robert Krell, who's the former director of postgraduate education in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia. The impression that the violence unfolding around them is somehow invisible to the state responsible for their protection has overwhelmed not only relative newcomers to Canada, like Rugeheimer, a man you discussed, but also Jews who have lived in Canada for decades. Then you refer to Robert Crell. And the next section is, almost none of these verbal or physical assaults, okay, so we're talking about repeated demonstrations, for example, all

across the country, long-term occupations of the university campuses, most particularly at McGill and at the University of Toronto, with like sporadic outbursts at Concordia, which is its own kind of rat hole, and then in a variety of other places across Canada, right? Riots in Montreal as well, downtown demonstrations in Toronto. Almost none of these verbal or physical assaults are coming from white supremacists, very rare breed in Canada, or anti-Semites of the right-wing variety. Now those people exist.

When I joined forces with the Daily Wire, one of whose lead spokespeople, let's say, is Ben Shapiro, who's probably the most well-known Orthodox Jew, American Orthodox Jew in the world, the right-wing antisemites came after me in droves, and they had been doing that for years for a variety of reasons. So those people exist, and they're entirely detestable in 15 different dimensions, but they're not organized in the same manner as these left-wing anti-Semites and they don't pose anywhere near the danger. And well, this is what you describe in your article. They are being carried out by self-described progressives, Arabs, and often recent

immigrants who are operating inside an ideological framework of settler colonialism, which casts Canada, the US, Australia, and most of all Israel as irredeemably illegitimate constructs of imperialism, capitalism, genocide, and racism. It's an ideology that has found a comfortable home in Trudeau's Canada. Okay, so let's zero in on this a little bit. So I wrote an article about Jewish support for the Democrats about three months ago for a UK publication that was, I tried to publish it at the National Post and at The Telegraph,

and they'll usually pretty much take whatever I send them, but they found this one too contentious. That's odd. Yeah, you saw it one too contentious. That's odd. Yeah, you saw it. No, I say that's odd. Did it appear finally? It appeared in … oh, let's see. I can't … no, you know, it escapes me momentarily. You know what?

After this, you should send it to me. I'll send it to you. But let me just tell you, it's just because in the US, the support among Jews for the Democrats is very high. Yep. Historically runs 75 to 80 percent. Now you draw some relationships in your article, which I think are very much worth drawing, because I don't know, maybe this took the Jewish liberal community by surprise. But it's completely unsurprising if you understand the progressive ideological agenda that the

Palestinians were cast as victims. And if people are going to play out a victim-victimizer narrative, which is a progressive narrative, the Jews are always going to be cast as victim-victimizers because they are overrepresented in positions of authority and preeminence. Radically so. And now, my interpretation of that is that the competent rise to the top, and there's a variety of reasons for excessive Jewish competence, and it's marked, for example, in the fact that the Jews have produced an overwhelmingly disproportionate number, let's

say, of Nobel laureates. And so it's a culture that produces, what, places tremendous emphasis on intellectual ability, and there's more to it than that. But the alternative hypothesis is that it's a cabal, and it's a cabal that dominates, and it's a worldwide cabal, and if you buy the victim, eyes are victim narrative, which is key to the progressive agenda, then the Jews are going to be at the top of the list. Now-

The whole diversity, equity and inclusion phenomenon, there's absolutely no room for the Jews there. It's impossible to- Well, if the rule is, if your ethnic group is overrepresented statistically, you're an oppressor, then that puts the Jews at the top of the oppressor hierarchy. Okay, so now, one of the things I'm curious about, I'd like your thoughts about this, is that I don't exactly understand why the Jewish community didn't see this coming. Because this is a logical consequence

we mean American Jews like well I'm going to talk about Canadian Jews things a little weird in the United States and I mean I think I can understand a lot of the intellectual community the strata in the United States fire you know finding Donald Trump vulgar and repugnant and that's why a lot of Jews I think didn't vote for him yeah, I think that's true for many people. They didn't vote for Trump. But it's since- The Israelis, interestingly, supported Trump more than Kamala Harris presidency.

You know, they kind of went, oh yeah, well, you know. They would like to admit it, but I hope Trump was. Well, the Democrats didn't exactly cover themselves in glory with regards to their support for Israel after October 7th. So I think the Israelis understand more clearly because of necessity which side their bread is buttered on, let's say. But like, this really is, it's really a pernicious twist, right?

Because I do see the victimizer-victim narrative driving this radical increase in left-wing antisemitism, and I don't see any way of… That's one way of understanding it. I think other people have used the term cultural Marxism, which kind of… you know, it certainly borrows the language of Marxism and borrows the language of the left, but of course replaces the proletariat, the working class, is replaced by this kind of, you know, rainbow coalition, ethnic, racial, and gender subsets and subgroups. Yes, I think, well, I think that's, those are parallel explanations. The other thing I think that's important to understand about antisemitism, it's not just

like any other prejudice, it's not just another bigotry. It's a conspiracy theory. It's always been a conspiracy theory. And I think a lot of people who perhaps were once Marxists or are informed by the intellectual tradition in Marxism can easily get that wrong, can easily imagine that the powerful hand of the international bourgeoisie, their names often end in Stein and Berg, and the next thing you know, it's the Jews are being thrown down wells. And I think just to understand where we are in Canada particularly, I think it's really

necessary to understand the trajectory of the left over the last 25, 30 years. Well, go back a little further. Yes, and also the fact that when you describe the trajectory of the left, you're also now over the last 25, 30 years. Well, go back a little further. Yes, and also the fact that when you describe the trajectory of the left, you're also now describing the trajectory of the federal liberals, which wouldn't have necessarily been the case for the last 10 years? Well, here's how it goes. Okay, lay it out.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, right, much of the democratic left was perfectly content with this, was very happy about this. With the collapse. Yes. Yes. Much of the democratic left was, or at least resigned to it and confused by it. And then during the 1990s, the primary iteration of left-wing activism and politics was anti-globalization, showing up with these massive demonstrations at the IMF and the World Bank and the World

Economic Forum. And then came 9-1-1. And 9-1-1 was kind of like a blunt trauma wound to everybody's head. Everybody went a little bit weird. It was such a shock. I mean, it was like out of a movie, some kind of a science fiction movie. And immediately what happened was, you know, the lefts, the iteration of the international left and the activist milieu was cloaked in anti-war activism, right?

And it shouldn't have taken much effort on the part of the mass media. Unfortunately, and I have to confess as a lifelong journalist, the media was not at all helpful in failing to recognize that this phenomenon that was being presented on the nightly news and on the front pages of the paper as an anti-war movement, they were actually on the other side. They weren't against war. They were on the other side. And at the core of it, at the very, very core of it, whatever you happen to think about

Afghanistan or Iraq, at the core of it was anti-Zionism, this thing called anti-Zionism. And that had sort of percolated from the 1970s, a lot of it was informed by Soviet propaganda, but from the United Nations, the Durban Conference, the proposition that Zionism is racism. Now, in Canada, the way Irwin Kotler put it to me, I think very well, who he's kind of my lodestar, I confess. Tell everybody who he is. Well, he's a former Canadian justice minister. He founded the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights, and I'm a senior fellow with

the Raoul Wallenberg Center. And he's beloved of persecuted Democrats the world round, whether it's Hong Kong or Belarus or just about anywhere, Russia. Anyway, the way he put it to me was that in Canada, particularly, the United Nations is kind of in our DNA. The way we understand our role in the world, our place in the world, I mean, we were there at the foundation of Israel, we were there in the crafting of the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights.

We were there in all of the protocols and conventions that arose from the ashes of the Shoah. This was a very Canadian thing and something to be proud of. But what we haven't really noticed over the years is the way the United Nations has been taken over by the Organization of the Islamic Congress. It's been taken over by the police state block. The last time I looked, I think Beijing was basically in control of seven of the 11 major United Nations agencies, and then you get the United Nations Relief Works Agency, which is this strange, strange organization that keeps alive the prospect that Israel is just a temporary aberration and that one of the, you know, somehow the massively growing Palestinian

refugee population, it's not really a refugee population, will somehow be sorted by the restoration of a Palestinian or an Arab sovereignty in all the places where Israel currently exists. So it's really hard for Canadians to sort of think, hmm, maybe the United Nations, maybe these, are we the baddies? And so how do you see that in parallel think, hmm, maybe the United Nations, maybe these, are we the baddies? You know?

And so how do you see that in parallel with the politicization of, like, the pro-Hamas movements in Canada? And there's things running in parallel here. We talked about the victim-victimizer narrative, we talked about the, what would you say, the alliance between the progressive left and the claim that Zionism is part of the colonial movement, which includes Canada and the claim that Zionism is part of the colonial movement, which includes Canada and the US. Now you've introduced Canada's role in the UN and our historical allegiance with the UN. How do you see those tangling together? The way I see those tangling together, if we can

think of it in terms of the Liberal Party or the Trudeau Liberals, right, not the same as a lot of not the same as a lot of what a lot of people imagine the liberals to be, is that this kind of intellectual slovenliness that the sort of blind adherence to United Nations declarations and so on. And the entire panoply of its colonial settler state politics, its diversity, equity and inclusion politics. So Canada's historical alliance. It becomes susceptible to it. It's just there's no way that it can defend itself against a virulent, lurid, blood-curdling, anti-Semitic, anti-Syphs. Okay, so let me summarize that and tell me if I've got it right.

So we've seen the rise of this progressive insistence that projects like Canada and the United States, etc., and Israel are part of this colonial insistence that projects like Canada and the United States, etc., and Israel are part of this colonial capitalist oppressive enterprise. Now that's permeated Canadian society to some degree, but it's also permeated the UN. And Canada has been historically aligned with the UN, and our foreign policy has been determined by that alliance for a very long time. Kind of, yeah. Well, influenced then, if not determined, influenced,

and that was a matter of pride in Canada when the UN was quasi-functional organization, let's say. But so you see the emergence of that post-Soviet Union, Marxist-inspired colonial rhetoric in the UN and in Canada. And the fact that Canada has been allied with the UN has also shaped our foreign policy in a rather unthinking manner, especially under Trudeau, who has no, what would you say, has what? No knowledge, no imagination for, like, how do you explain the- Okay, here's Trudeau, here's Trudeau, here's the thing about Trudeau.

Yeah. There's really not much there. I hate to be uncharitable. I think it's time to be uncharitable. Okay. Well, there really isn't much there. I think you've been very interested in the phenomenon of narcissism. Hmm. There you go. Well, let me- The world is a vanity mirror.

And you have to remember when he came along, it's sort of parallel to the rise of Trump in the United States, right? When he was first elected, just a few months from the election of Donald Trump. Donald Trump said all these scary things about Muslims, and then Justin Trudeau tweets, well, everybody's welcome to Canada. doesn't matter, you can be a Muslim, we love you. The next thing you know is on the front page of the Rolling Stone magazine is the toast of Vogue photo shoots, he's the leader of the free world.

He was the poster boy for the, he is the poster boy for the progressive movement internationally, I would say. Yeah, yeah would say. And he is the... Well, and the narcissism element, you know, you talked about him to some degree as an empty drum, let's say, and I have made reference to him as a narcissist. I mean, my observation in that regard was driven by the manner in which he adopted the leadership of the Liberal Party, because I felt at the... I'd like your opinion about this.

When he emerged, I thought I was of two opinions. People went to him and made the case that he would be a credible and popular leader of the Liberals, not least because of his name brand recognition. I can imagine being in that position, let's say, and thinking, okay, this is a risky enterprise because I don't have the CV that would indicate that I'm capable of running a G7 country.

But if I don't run, then the conservatives who were my father's foes, let's say, and aren't aligned with me politically have a really good crack at victory. And if I put my name forward, maybe we can forestall that. And then maybe I could put my nose to the grindstone and I could learn, I could surround myself with like high-level experts and I could learn to play the part if I, you know, if I was open to that kind of learning. Okay, that's an unlikely scenario, but he did in fact adopt it,

but he didn't do any of that, right? He didn't... Well, I think a lot of people, you know, he's not my cup of tea, but a lot of people were really swept. He was sort of like this matinee idol. You know, a lot of people got caught up in that. Yes, well, he's charming and he's elegant

and he's good looking and he knows how to behave in public and he's got an easy smile and women find him essentially irresistible. And very photogenic, very charming, as you say. Very, very, well, and he's been in that milieu his whole life and he's been groomed for that. But as far as the intellectual milieu, if there was such a thing, around his emergence, well, I mean, everybody was willing to give him a chance. I was willing to give him a chance. I remember speaking to him back when he was running for office, running for the, you know,

in the election, that period, and I was definitely willing to give them a shot. Why? Well, we spoke a lot about Syria. Yeah. And I have many friends and comrades who are associated with the Syrian Revolutionary Movement. And what the NATO countries, what was being asked of the NATO countries at the time was a no-fly zone over Syria. All we need is one NATO country to say, yes, we need to do this, because the Americans couldn't really understand what was going on.

And everyone hoped that it might be Trudeau who said, yeah, I'm in. And he did give me, and of course, there was the whole Syrian refugee issue, and he did try to, he made a lot of capital, political capital out of that. We can come to that in a moment. But to understand who he represents and what he's all about, you have to wind the clock back further. You remember when Michael Ignatyev was briefly the leader of the Liberal Party. Tell that story for the people.

Well, he's a very smart guy. Michael Ignatyev's class. He was a Harvard professor at the time when they invited him back to Canada. He'd been down in Massachusetts for like 20 years, something like that. Yeah, and a lot of people said, well, you're not really a Canadian visiting. He'd been out for quite a while. So anyway, I mean, I... He was an intellectual heavyweight.

Yeah, he was actually, I like Michael Ignatius, I mean, just as an intellectual. Well, he's certainly much more credible as a leader of a G7 country than Justin Trudeau, at least on the basis of his- Yeah, what we've got basically, you know, it's so difficult to explain this to people from away. You know, if you can imagine a kind of, oh, I don't know, a TikTok account run by a 19-year-old college girl in charge of a G7 country. That's basically what we're talking about. 14-year-old.

Okay. But anyway, okay, so he emerges. How does he present himself to the Liberal Party as a worthwhile leader of the party. And for this, he turned to McKinsey & Associates. A consulting firm, a major consulting firm. A massive global consulting firm, the apologist for dictators everywhere. I think, I don't know how many billions of dollars they've had to pay out in lawsuits for boosting Oxycontin sales in the United States. A fellow by the name of Dominic Barton, who happened to be a Canadian, who spent half his life in China as the head

of McKinsey. Trudeau brought him in, and essentially to add gravitas to his candidacy for the Liberal Party. Under whose advisement did he bring in McKinsey? Do you know? Like was that his idea? I don't imagine. Well, it's a small town. It is a small town. Yes. You know what I mean? Ottawa. It was essentially a function of the Canada-China Business Council. This is a really important thing for people to understand. His entire campaign was built around the proposition, and this is how he sort of lent gravitas to himself that the key to the future is China. Canada's future is China.

The middle class prosperity is all about China, China, China. And this immediately, he immediately accrued to himself a lot of money and a lot of power and a lot of help. The Demeret Corporation, the Power Corporation in Montreal, those whole circles. Of course, his father, people don't like to talk about this when they talk about Pierre Trudeau, but he was probably the most important propaganda asset for the Chinese Communist Party during the Maoist period in the English-speaking world. That's nothing.

It was just the Chinese Communists. Yeah. You know, what they kill, 100 million people. Exactly. Yeah. So, you know, and Trudeau would trade in this and say, well, you know, they know me in China, you know, I can, my family name. And a lot of that was sort of glossed over.

People didn't notice what was going on because... Well, people were optimistic about the... Because he was so glamorous, right? Well, we were also optimistic, I think, in the West for a reasonable amount of time that if China integrated itself into the Western economy, that they would liberalize across time. Some of us were. Well, it was a case you could put forward if you were aware with all due caution of the potential

risks. Right? Yeah, that's what I'm told. Look, I'm trying to give the devil his due here. Well, all I can tell you is that two things happened in 2001. What happened, the atrocities in New York and Washington, the Al-Qaeda atrocities, and the moment that the West put a knife to its own throat only three months later by admitting China into the World Trade Organization.

This is a massive event. And I mean, I think there were a lot of people of good faith who imagined that the more China modernized and became capitalist, they become more like us. People who understood China knew this was rubbish. It was not going to happen. Okay, so now we've got three things operating here. We've got the rise of this kind of real Marxism, we've got the UN influence, and now we have the China nexus, right?

This is all shaping what's happening in Canada. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, anybody who's followed Canadian politics at all in the last five years will be aware of the scandals associated with the intimacies between the Trudeau liberals and the United Front Work Department of the Chinese Communist Party and the Organization Department of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party, the manipulation and monkey wrenching of elections in 2019 and 2021. Yeah, we still don't know the full extent of it.

Yeah, the whole commission has yet to report, you know, sort of report. Right, and there's background rumors about a number of liberal MPs being unduly influenced on the financial side. Well, more than background rumors. One of the things that's difficult for people to grasp is that, you know, a lot of people ask me, my goodness, the Chinese must have something on Justin Trudeau. Some compromise. He doesn't see anything wrong with it.

He doesn't- Yes, well, that was evident in many of his pro-election practices. You know, if you take all the crazy thing, well, I don't know some of the things that the Democrats are saying about Trump and Russia were not crazy, but if you take all the extreme accusations that the Democrats are making about Trump's associations with the Kremlin in the 2015 election. Multiply that by 10, and you have in the real world Justin Trudeau's collusions and complicity with the Chinese Communist Party.

In the open, by the way. And this is the thing. To understand Justin Trudeau, you have to understand he sees nothing wrong with this. When he got elected, immediately after he got elected, in the first election, he sat down with a reporter from the New York Times and said said this is what basically Canada is. He saw a post-national state. With no identity. No core identity, no mainstream. And immediately the question should have turned to, I remember talking to Jerry Butts about this, his sort of principal advisor, because we used to be quite chummy. And you know John Ralston Saul. Jerry doesn't take much of me. He doesn't like me either.

Ah, okay. You know, John Ralston Saul, the philosopher, he wrote this concept of Canada as a postmodern state. And it was kind of a nuanced, interesting philosophy, whatever. And I remember talking to Jerry, I said, Trudeau kind of got that wrong. I mean, wasn't he kind of channeling John Ralston Saul? He said, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, he meant it post-national. And so here's the question, how do you do

nationalists? Where do you get that idea? Like Trudeau? Because first of all, it's an idea. So it's surprising he had it at all. Well, if you hang around with the Canada-China Business Council long enough, if you enthusiastically support, for instance, the largest overseas acquisition in the history of the People's Republic of China, the, you know, Sinox acquisition of Nexen. Flesh that out a little bit.

Well, yeah, it was at a time when, just before Justin Trudeau was elected, when the Chinese Communist Party was buying up all the major, really key strategic sort of spigot points in the oil patch in Alberta. And the Harper government, the cabinet was terribly divided about this. And eventually the good guys, the good guys won. The people I consider the good guys won. Harper said, okay, that's it. You know, sure, it's a lot of money. They're offering us twice the share value for every purchase they're making. But no, we do not want Canada's energy sector to be owned by the organization department of the Politburo. Probably better than that than Stephen Joe Bo. Anyway, where were we?

Okay, well, we're weaving a web here. The thing I find- Oh yeah, the post-national stuff. This is really key. How do you do national security in a post-national state? What does it even mean? You see, I don't think they really thought this through. That's a fair assumption. What are Canada's national interests if we're a post-national country? Well, there's no national interest by definition. There's this kind of...

And as I say, I don't know that I want to describe it as an ideology. It's kind of like an ideational package. This notion that Canada is this racist, colonial settler state that has engaged in genocide after genocide against its indigenous peoples, and we're the liberals and we're the nice ones. And so that's essentially what Trudeau was all about. And I think, you know, there's an adage that what starts with the Jews doesn't end with the Jews.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. They're the canaries in the coal mine. They are, and that's very true. That's very true. And I don't want to dispute that, and I don't want what I'm about to say as a contradiction of that. My personal view is that if it did end with the Jews, it would still be evil. So, big deal, kind of a deal. A lot of people will put it this way, you know, first they come for the Saturday people and then they'll come for the Sunday people.

Right, right. Yeah. The candidate happened the other way around. It happened on the weekend of May 29th. Yeah, May 29th, 2021, when Justin Trudeau lowered the flag on Parliament Hill and on the Monday ordered the flag lowered on all federal buildings across the country, owing to a report out of Kamloops about the discovery of a mass grave. And on the Tuesday, the chief of the Kamloops First Nation said, well, actually, we didn't

say mass grave. But the flag stayed down. The flags were at half mast. For how long? Like six months? Seven months, I think it was. It was unbelievable. And the people who, God bless them, who managed to get them back up again with the Mohawks, thank God for the Mohawks. Oh, I didn't know, we have a lot of people who are veterans and we lower our flags on the 11th of November and also on Aboriginal Veterans Day. So how the hell are we going to lower the flags if they're already lowered?

Do something about it. How do you understand the relationship between, okay, so now we have a lot of balls in the air. We have the post-national state, we have the idea of the colonialist state, we have the perversion of the UN, we have the rise of neo-Marxism in Canada, and we have the pernicious influence of the Chinese communists on Trudeau's campaign and his worldview right from the beginning stemming from his father. Okay, so now we have to take all that, we have to tie it back to this rise in anti-Semitism.

Now the nexus there, at least in part, is the ideology of colonialist state. You can wrap it up this way, this strange thing that we've just described, right? A lot of people talk about woke politics or whatever. It's not wicked because it's anti-Semitic. It's anti-Semitic because it's wicked. It has nowhere else to go. This is what history tells us about the agony of the Jews. And I really wish we had been able to kind of emerge from this.

Everybody loves dead Jews. Everyone wants to be crying, you know, isn't that sad? But God forbid they should stand up on their own two feet and say, actually, no, we're restoring Jewish sovereignty in our ancient homeland, and you will not take that tone with us anymore, thank you very much. You know, everybody would prefer sort of be like, you know, sing Pete Seeger songs and pat Jews on the head.

When Jews say, actually, no, we're, I mean, thanks for the help, but we're going to stand up for ourselves. This is what a lot of people on the left could not abide when the Jews began to get saucy in this way. And interestingly, this is very tied into the way the sort of true Dole liberals understand indigenous people in Canada. And it's tied into the whole sort of, from Turtle Island to Palestine that you keep hearing in the activist milieu. Turtle Island being the name for Canada. Well it was actually a white guy who came up with that.

Yes, I'm sure that it has nothing to do with indigenous… Gary Snyder, he was a poet in Chicago I think. Anyway, I mean there is some vague reference that can be drawn to I think an Anishinaabe creation, but whatever. I think it's a, it is a baudelarization of indigenous, you know, the magnificent cultural diversity of indigenous peoples in this country, which we could talk about because you live in an interesting place or we're filming this in a very interesting place. But the idea that if indigenous people would stand up and say, actually, okay, this whole territory as far as the eye can see, you idiots, you never signed a treaty with us.

We still own the land under British and Canadian constitutional law. Aboriginal title is enforceable and we're going to start acting like we own the place. You better deal with us. You're not going to chop down all our trees and ship them off to China. Thank you very much. You're going to leave a lot of the wealth in the countryside with all our white neighbors. We're going to work in sawmills. We're going to produce wealth from this territory.

People like Justin Trudeau's liberals do not want to hear this. They would rather come to you and say, oh yes, would you like a wellness center? You know, stroke you on the back. Oh, you put your victims, your survivors. And by the way, here's 380 million dollars to busy yourself rummaging around in graveyards for the next 10 years. This is, I think, really important to understand about this phenomenon. It is a kind of liberal racism, a liberal racism of low expectations.

So there's all that. But there's also the fact that there's now 1.8 million Muslims in the country. Right, because we need another dimension of complexity in this conversation. And I don't wanna, you know, this is really fighting words for me there's now 1.8 million Muslims in the country. Right, because we need another dimension of complexity in this conversation. And I don't want to, you know, this is really fighting words for me, because, you know,

a lot of my friends are Muslims and Arabs and my compatriots and my circle. And we have to be very, very, very careful about the way we talk about this. But the reality of it is that when you have this But the reality of it is that when you have this notion of Canada, this, you know, this – Multicultural. Yeah, this multiplicity of diversities and so on, what you find is that there are certain

organizations and institutions in this country that are very well financed and resourced by the federal government and are intended to speak on behalf of, for instance, Canadian Muslims. One of them is the Muslim Association of Canada, which is explicitly devoted to the theology of Hassan Albana, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, the fountainhead of Islamism, who was a collaborator with and a philosophical fellow traveler with Adolf Hitler. So this is a bit of a problem, you know? I mean, this is not going to work out well in the long run.

And there's only 350,000 Jews. Right, right, right. As, as, wasn't It's a small town. Wasn't it Melanie Jolie who commented that people have to pay attention to the ethnic makeup of her writing? Yeah, like Thomas Mokere, who's kind of an old-fashioned social democrat. Somebody who speaks the same language I speak, quite frankly. Former leader of the federal national democrats, the Socialist Party in Canada.

And he said, you know, this Canada's position on Israel is incomprehensible. You insist because you need to that Israel has a right to defend itself, and yet you will refuse to send any munitions to Israel or anything at all that might be used as a part of an airplane that might be in the Israeli Air Force. And she went so far as to, I think it was General Dynamics as a plant in Quebec. So it's actually American material going to Israel. And she said, no, we're not going to issue an export permit for that either. So Israel has a right to defend itself, but Israel is not allowed to

have the means to defend itself. So Mulcair says, this is incomprehensible. It's just gobbledygook, mumbo jumbo, talking to Melanesio Lea, Foreign Affairs Minister. And her response was, Thomas, have you seen the demographics of my writing? Yeah, right. And I have, actually. That's a stunning response. Yeah. A stunning, amazing she would say that.

Yeah. I mean, first of all, it's reprehensible that that's the case, but the fact that she would be so blatant as to say it is really quite the miracle. And if you look at the Democrats of her writing, or it's probably the demographics of her writing, Hansa Karshermell, the immigration into that writing has been off the charts. I mean, immigration into the country has been off the charts. Right to add another dimension of complexity as well. Yeah, and we should talk about Poliev, because when we're talking about Trudeau, we really

are talking about a dead man walking. Yesterday his government almost collapsed. Yes, it's done that a number of times without him actually disappearing. Oh, nothing like yesterday. Nothing like yesterday. No, I understand. Wow. I understand.

For everybody watching and listening, his deputy prime minister resigned yesterday, also his minister of finance, and like the fifth powerful woman, so to speak, in his feminist cabinet that has had to abscond because, well, for a variety of reasons. One of them apparently being that Justin Trudeau finds it impossible to deal with women who have anything approximating their own opinions. And just for fun, her replacement, Dominique LeBlanc, used to be Trudeau's babysitter. Just imagine if Donald Trump appointed his babysitter as the Secretary of the Treasury. The Yanks would have a lot of fun with that.

You don't think being Trudeau's babysitter qualifies him to be finance minister of a G7? Just wondering. I don't know. Yeah, well that also speaks to this weird, we could throw this into the mix too. I don't know what you think about this, but it seems to me as well that the way that Canada is constituted, especially with its emphasis on bilingualism, that dooms the entire country to domination by the 13% of French Canadian bilingualism.

What is it, Canada? Here's the thing, the other thing that Americans have to understand is that Canada is a bilingual, constitutional monarchy, one of the most decentralized federal systems on earth that is thinly populated and spread out across the top of the most dynamic cultural... Powerhouse. ... in the history of nation states. So the role of a Canadian Prime Minister has always been to unite the country, to keep, you know, the role of federal policy has always been to allow Canadians to have a conversation amongst themselves.

It's why we fund the CBC and the Canadian Council for the Arts and what have you. And it's a difficult thing to do because we are very, very culturally diverse. I mean, in every traditional sense of the word, the French-speaking people of Quebec, the Pouillaine Quebecers are a nation in every conventional sense of the word. And Canada is, well, yeah, I guess we're kind of a nation, but it's complicated. I mean, it is vastly complicated and it's a huge landscape. So the function of a prime minister has to be to unite the country. Yes, under something approximating a national identity.

That's right. Something core. Dispensed with immediately. Something that when push comes to shove, it's possible that we might be able to muster fire in the belly. Right. The defense of the country. Or maybe even just the desire to keep the country together and functioning.

Quite so. If we couldn't go all the way out for passion. And so that's the other thing about Trudeau is that it's a complete rejection of that, a complete reversal of that. It's just like, meh, we're a post-national country. And immigration, fine, you want to come in, yes. You know, Dominic Barton, who ended up being our ambassador to China, the guy who came from China's McKinsey and Associates and who crafted Trudeau's campaign material, at the very, very, very beginning of his rise to politics, says, yeah, we should

actually have about a half a million people coming into Canada every year. We should aim for a hundred million. We should at least double our population in the next generation or two. Well, we've had more than half a million coming in. Well, yes, we have. Yeah, by a substantial number. We don't know how many people live in this country, Jordan.

We know from a recent census it's about 41 million, but on top of that, we have, well, for instance, over the next 12 months, 5 million people who live in Canada on various kinds of temporary permits and so on. That's one-eighth of the population. Within the next 12 months, those permits expire. Then there's another between 50 and 500,000, according to the official guess of the Immigration and Refugees and Citizenship Department, who are what they call out-of-contract workers, which are undocumented workers. Now, for Americans to hear these numbers, you know, America's 10 times as many people,

it's 10 times as populous. So you know, just do the math, right? If there's 5 million, if there are 50 million American or people living in the United States whose temporary permits expire within the next 12 months and who have all given every impression that they do not intend to leave. Yes, why would they leave? So Pierre Pauliev's coming along, right? And the interesting thing about Pierre Pauliev, this goes back to what we were talking about earlier about language, and it was this liberal or what the hell. Pierre Pauliev, when he talks about housing, when he talks about employment, when he talks about access to healthcare, when he talks about wages, he's

Bernie Sanders. Americans have to understand this. Try to imagine Bernie Sanders. And also the trade union vote has gone to the conservatives, this has never happened before. The working class vote has gone to Pierre Polyev. I don't know, I mean, I'm not a partisan conservative. I don't know if I've ever written a conservative sentence in my life, by the way, although most of my friends seem to be conservatives. I don't know

how that happens. Well, the whole world's upside down, so that's not surprising. So what the hell? Whatever the classic political distinctions were 15 years ago, whatever they are now, bears no relationship to what they were 15 years ago. So my great fear, and relationship to what they were 15 years ago. So my great fear, and I'll close with this, and you can challenge me, tell me I'm wrong, or if you like, whatever, argue. I think we've got about a year or two before everything starts to come unglued. And I'm very worried about this. I've always been an optimist, an inveterate optimist. But I actually haven't seen in Poliev a degree of sophistication in comprehending the nature and

the scope of what he's going to be facing when he takes it. Well, I don't know if he can comprehend it. I mean, I regard myself as a moderately sophisticated political observer, and you've made me more pessimistic today. Sorry. Well, I was already very concerned about the state of Canada because I think that, well, I'll give you an example, and you probably know this already, but before Justin took office, GDP per capita in Canada was approximately at parity with the US.

Okay, now our richest province, Ontario, the inhabitants of our richest province by per capita GDP are poorer than the average inhabitant of Mississippi. I thought it was Alabama, Is it Mississippi? Same thing. Last thing I... The people in our richest province are poorer than the people in the U.S. poorest state. Right? That's a nine-year decline. It's an absolute bloody catastrophe. And we know Trudeau just announced a $62 billion deficit yesterday, which was $22 billion higher than

the pessimistic estimate that his finance minister had come up with a few months ago. Whatever state we think the country is in is nowhere near as grim as the state the country is actually in. And what my fear for Poliev is that he's going to take power in October, because I think Trudeau will hang on till then, but maybe not, we'll see. And things will be revealed to be demonstrably worse than they are on multiple dimensions, you've outlined like six in our discussion today, and he will be saddled with the blame. And so he'll have a four-year term while he muddles through the absolute bloody nightmare

that Trudeau has left, and then the Liberals are connived their way back into power. No, that's never going to happen. Okay, so you're less pessimistic on that. On that, yeah. I mean, well, the Liberals might, but it might be some iteration of a Liberal party that older Canadians are more familiar with. Well, the liberals might, but it might be some iteration of a liberal party that older Canadians are more familiar with. Yes.

Well, yeah, I think the probability, like the most likely outcome in an October election in 2025 is that the liberals are essentially decimated. Their history. Yeah. I mean, they could remember after Mulroney, after the Mulroney government collapsed, essentially, I think the piece, the progressive conservatives were reduced to three seats federally, right? That could easily happen. Well, here's an interesting story.

You know, everybody, you find this a lot of sort of speculation about, well, oh, this Trump thing, you know, could it happen in Canada? Right-wing populism, yadda yadda, everyone wets their pants. Oh my God, not here. Well, it actually did happen here, and it happened back then, and it was the Reform Party. Yeah. That's also happening in the UK.

You know that Farage fashioned his party after the Reform Party in Canada. Well, one of the things I think conservatives should remember about the Reform Party is the result of the Reform Party was they reduced the conservatives to three and they ushered in a decade of liberal rule. So good luck to you lads. Canadians I think are, you know, this is something I also want to stress. The overwhelming majority of Canadians are not anti-Semites. Oh, definitely not, yes.

I would say that I would say probably the overwhelming majority of Muslims are not anti-Semites. Although that's hard to say. I referred to- It would also depend to some degree on how you phrase the question. That's right. In fact, I referred to a study of Muslim public opinion. And it was actually the proportion of Muslims who agreed to answer a particular question about suicide bombing and about whether or not the state of Israel should be allowed

to exist. It was pretty high. There was, do you remember, there was a big debate about five years ago, six years ago about Islamophobia in Canada. Oh yes, I remember. You know, there was going to be law, there was going to be statutory reform to sort of outlaw Islamophobia.

Yeah, another hate crime. And the liberals refused to define what they actually meant by Islamophobia. You have to find that sort of thing after the fact. Yeah, and you would hear the liberals say that every day, Muslims in Canada are subjected to racist abuse and intimidation. And I remember because I'm a complete public opinion poll nerd. Data is the thing. I need to get, give me the data.

Everybody's opinion, who cares? Give me the data. And public opinion back then showed that the overwhelming majority of, well, Muslims in Canada were actually demonstrated a higher degree of pride in their country than what you might call old stock Canadians. And the main complaint that Muslims had about Canada was so damn cold here. Nobody was worried about, you know, nobody was freaking- Perfectly valid complaint, by the way. You know, it's just, I think we have to be very, very, very careful about understanding

the nature of the problem. And we have to be very careful about the words that we use, the language that we use, and we all use these words, the kind of euphemisms, left-wing or progressive. Are you kidding me? What is progressive about the phenomena that we end up describing as progressive? How is this in any way an aid of human progress or civilizational progress? It's reactionary. It's regressive. It's not liberal.

So let's return to the beginning of our conversation and the topic that we had begun to investigate, because I'm curious about why, what it was over the last year. Tell me the story of your engagement with the rise in anti-Semitism, like, phenomenon by phenomenon, you know? I mean, the things that leaped out for me were the riots in Montreal. I mean, I just hate to see that. I lived in Montreal for seven years. I loved Montreal.

It was a great city. It was safe, like you could walk. A woman could walk anywhere in Montreal at three in the morning with no problem. There was no poor areas. And it had an unbelievably rich nightlife and culture. And it was a wonderful place to live, extremely peaceful, and it was diverse in the most positive possible manner. And to see riots, to see the sorts of things that are happening in Kut Kort well, a current, I suppose, professor at the

University of Toronto to see the encampments there and the encampments at McGill. I got my doctoral degree at McGill and I loved McGill and it was a great university. And so there's terrible things afoot in Canada that I would have never dreamed of occurring here. And, you know, I have a particular and personal animus against the Trudeau government for a variety of reasons, but I'm very curious about what you've seen. Like, I don't even know how politically aligned you and I are. I mean, that's a complicated thing in today's world, but you're obviously very

disturbed by what you're observing. And we have a lot of international listeners and viewers on this show. And so what have you seen emerge in Canada? Yeah, well, I'll go back, I think, to what I was inarticulately trying to describe about the trajectory of the left since the 1990s. I think by the 80s, I think, or the 90s, you could say that all of we'd won all or one, we'd won we, if I can say that, because I kind of came from the left, although I have no ideological commitments and I'm kind of sour these days on the left. But anyway, we'd won all our bouts. We'd won them all.

Civil rights, equal rights for people of color. Gay marriage. Gay marriage, the right of women to equality in the workplace, the right of unions to organize, labor relations standards, environmental laws were coming along. We'd won all our big battles. And in the court of public opinion as well, not just legally or electorally. Oh yes, oh yes.

And I think, I mean, a mistake, get too weird, not to get too weird about it, but one mistake Marxists made was this idea that there is no more useful role for the bourgeoisie in the progress of human society. They actually were wrong about that because it was the bourgeoisie that led the charge against slavery and for women's rights. So at any rate, by the 80s or the 90s, you know, we'd won. So something peculiar has happened and there is this very dark phenomenon that has occupied the places where all the places where the left used to be.

And it is invariably masochistic, sinister, self-hating, let's tear down the liberal democracies. Let's cast Canada as this illegitimate to racist colonial settler state. Let's identify Israel as the epitome of everything that we loathe and despise. It's an ugly, ugly, ugly thing. And I mean, I think it's ugly. Maybe that's an opinion. I don't know. I think it's ugly. Maybe that's an opinion. I don't know. I think it's demonstrably true. And that was the thing that I was watching over the years,

is that, you know, I spent a lot of, well, my last major book was about Afghanistan, and I spent a lot of time in Syria and the Northeast with the Kurds and what have you. How much knowledge do you think typical Canadians have about what's going on? Very, very little. And why do you think that is? A lot. Okay, here's a proposition. Everybody likes to beat up on the news media, right?

I've come up in the news media in the old discipline. You spend six years as an apprentice before you're a journeyman in the old guild system. Six years as a reporter. After that, well, maybe you'll be allowed to have an opinion about something. Really elaborate conventions and disciplines in what was essentially a trade, a craft. And with the golden era was about the 1980s, I would say, 1970s, 1980s, and then with the advent of digital technologies and a whole bunch of other reasons, the news media, the conventional news media

began to wither away and collapse. And it's replaced by, and people talk about the mainstream media. Well, the mainstream media today is Twitter. That's the mainstream media now. And so in this period, it became increasingly difficult for journalists to actually tell a story, the results be downed. It's much easier to basically fill your shift with three or four stories for Deadline, each of which more or less uphold the narrative framework of the subscriber base

that your media organization is targeting. A lot of it does have, a lot of it really is about the decline and the collapse of news media. I mean, I can talk about that a little bit because it's something I know, but I think a lot of it too, I think is language, is simple language that probably ends up with most ordinary people who are only casually interested in the struggle for democracy in China or events in the Middle East or this strange creature that has come to occupy all the spaces where the liberal party used to be.

It's the language that we use. How conservatives are the conservative? How liberal are the liberal? Well, the conservatives in the UK weren't very conservative for the 14 years they've governed. Well, yeah. I mean, we'll see what happens in Canada. You can't call Donald Trump a conservative.

He's anything but. No. Well, he... And I don't think you can call Justin Trudeau a liberal, really, in any conventional sense. No, I don't... Very authoritarian, very much a sort of state capitalist thought control kind of way of looking at politics. Well, you know, one of the things our discussion is sort of highlighting, I think, is that

let's say you adopt the narrative that the center is corrupt and patriarchal and oppressive and Canada's destiny is post-national. Okay, now, one hypothetical problem with that is, well, what rises to take the place of the center? And you've pointed to all sorts of things, like a demented kind of neo-Marxism, the rise of an authoritarian UN on the foreign policy front, the dire and dismal influence of the Chinese Communist Party, the rise of the Islamist faction of the increasingly large Muslim population, and then, well, okay, that's for, and then the rise, and the associated

rise of the, yeah, yeah, the colonialist narrative that casts Israel as king of the oppressive states, right? Well, so it's this fractionation, you know, once that centre collapses instead of everybody becoming free, you get this absurd fractionation and then a war between different, what would you say, centres of power. And we're trying to flesh out the pattern of that. I mean, you pointed to a lot of things that are going wrong simultaneously, and there's some thread that unites them, but some of it's just emblematic of a kind of chaotic collapse of identity, right?

And so, and Trudeau's going to step out of this, leaving us in Canada in a terrible mess. Let's talk about Poliev a little bit. I mean, I know him, and what I've seen so far, I'm happy about. I mean, I've been talking to conservatives in Canada ever since 2016, really, when I sort of burst onto the scene in my opposition to Bill C-16. You know, and the conservatives that I talked to eight years ago were much more timid bunch than the conservatives that are emerging in Canada now. And so, Poliev and Daniel Smith, they're both tough people.

And so, that's heartening as far as I'm concerned. Whether Poliev is in a position to right the ship that Trudeau has inverted, that's a whole different question. I mean, I wish it well, but I'm also pleased in a, what would you say, personal sense that I don't have his job because, like, I mean, I look at Canada with a kind of horror at the moment because we are in very bad shape economically. And I mean, just the fact that just, Canada, Canadians now make 60% as much as the average American. And our real estate is twice as expensive. Yeah, and the trajectory is downward, right? And I think it was, what, was it World Economic Forum

or the World Bank? I don't remember which agency. Their projection for Canada was worst performing economy over the next 30 years in the G7. Well, and that's on top of the fact that's adjacent to the fact that if Canada had its act together in anything approximating a realistic manner, at least the West could be rich beyond belief because it's definitely the case that the world is dying, fighting for our natural resources. And I mean, you saw the fact that the German chancellor

and the Japanese prime minister came cap in hand to Trudeau and said, how about some natural gas for your friends there, buddy? And his argument was, I can't make a business case for that. And the thing is, that was before Canadians re-elected him. And they just re-elected the NDP in British Columbia. And so I look at Canada and I think, we're in serious trouble, and we have by no means even begun to learn our lesson. And that's a relatively terrifying process.

Be very, very careful when you use the term we. 20%, only 20% of Canadians voted for Trudeau in the last election. He hasn't gained anything. He's lost a lot. I think a lot of people are scared of the unknown. I think they're willing to step out into the cool and the dark, but there are still people who will not vote conservative. Fair play.

It doesn't really matter. We're going to see an absolute route of the liberals in the next election. One of the things we haven't even discussed is the rise of the independentist in Quebec, the bloc. Because there's another dimension of complexity that tears Canada apart, which Canada is in such bad shape that when we're talking about threats to Canada, we didn't even mention the separatists. Yeah, right. So that- That's a very real possibility.

Although one of the things that's interesting about Quebec is that all of these things that bedevil us and are increasingly bourgeois sensitivities about race and gender and Quebecers aren't fazed. Meh, they don't care. They do not care. In Quebec, in the French, you know, poor land Quebecers, they're not woke. The left in Quebec is not woke. And that I find fascinating.

I think they have a real sense of themselves. A lot of it doesn't really lay their idea of extreme secularism, doesn't sit well with me. But what the hell? They seem to know what they're about. And yeah, I mean, I'm a Canadian or the Quebec independence movement would never regard itself as post-national. Exactly. Right.

I mean, far from it. Far from it. And there's also an argument that I've heard that a lot of young Quebecers, they don't remember back in the day. They don't remember the old days. They're not, you know, they're not interested in separatism. Yeah. You know?

So, who knows? Who knows? But it does add a layer of complexity to this. Okay, so now, why did you feel compelled to shed light on rising antisemitism? Why is that something? Like, you talked about a lot of things today that could have occupied your attention and obviously have. Now, you and Barry at the Free Press put a lot of time and effort into this particular article, and it's a pretty hard-hitting article,

and it's quite distressing, if you have any sense at all. Why is it the phenomenon of rising antisemitism, or is it even antisemitism? Is it the dominance of the pro-Hamas movement? Is it the rise of the radical left? Is it like, where, why did you focus on anti-Semitism per se given the range of your concerns about Canada? Why did you bring that to international attention, let's say?

Because the Jews are terrified. Because the Jews are persecuted in this country. Okay, now, and do you see that as a canary in the coal mine phenomenon? Yeah, you could- I know you said that that's not all of it, and fair enough. You could put it that way. I think it would be of concern to me even if they were not the canary in the coal mine. Yeah, that's-

I mean, if it's a personal question, you know, it's an odd thing. I mean, it's a family thing. My association with the Jewish community goes back a long way. I'm a Tague, I'm Irish Catholic. But it's complicated. And it is a concern of mine and the company that I keep. And … But it's such a terrible thing on Canada's reputation, too. The thing is, when you talk to old Jews, like really sophisticated guys who've been in and out of office, or university professors.

And they will tell you, you know, with their voice cracking, I have never seen anything like this in my life. Yeah, right. Oh, I feel exactly the same way. You know, all the communities I talk to, the Hillel on campus, you know, synagogues across the country, people are afraid and they feel abandoned and they feel as though their government has abandoned them. I think this is worth noticing.

And what am I? I'm just a guy. I'm a reporter. I'm a writer. So I've done my best to document this and to bear witness to it. And I don't know what's going to come of it. Tell me. I'm here talking to you about it.

There you go. Yeah, yeah. Well, tell me, it's funny, you know, because I read your article, because I follow the free press, and I've had some dealings with Barry Weiss and positive dealings with Barry Weiss, complex, but positive dealings with Barry Weiss.

And I read your article and I thought, I should probably talk to Terry about this article and maybe Barry too. And then like four hours later, she wrote me and she said, you know, I really think you should talk to Terry about this article. And so, you know, that was propitious as was the fact that I'm out on the West Coast here so I can talk to you directly. But yeah, that was funny the way that happened. I said, you know, Jordan Peterson, he's like one of these big forehead guys, everybody

likes him. You know, Barry, Barry, you talk to him, Barry. And, you know, he's great. But you know, you meet up with him in New York or wherever. And then Barry said, well, actually, he's on Vancouver Island. Okay, that's like three hours from where I am. So that's how it happened. Yeah, well, I'm I'm shocked by what's happened to Canada. I mean, one of the precipitating factors in my recent move to the United States was Bill C-63. I don't know if you've managed to delve into the weeds with regards to Bill C-63, but it's a bill that's so awful that every time I read it, I think, because I'm not a lawyer, you know, I think, there's no way I'm understanding this properly,

you know, and then I read it again and I think, yeah, well, you know, usually I can understand what I'm reading and this is, I mean, it's such a dense web of stunning, incompetent malevolence because it starts with these pronouncements about predicting children from online exploitation and pornography. Simultaneously, of course, the biggest pornography network in the world operates out of Canada, right? That's Pornhub, which operates out of Montreal. And to call it a despicable organization

is to barely scrape the surface. If Trudeau and his minions were the least bit serious about protecting children from online pornography, there's a lot better places they can start than Bill C-63. But virtue signaling at the beginning, virtue signaling at the end, we're protecting children. It's like we have, I don't think you are, but then in the middle, there's all these clauses detailing out first the construction of a bureaucracy, which as far as I can tell would have unlimited power, all the power of the court and the power of unlimited growth.

And it says right in the bill that that court system, a new parallel court system, would not be bound by the traditional standards of evidence. That's right. I read that and I thought, what? Like, really? You know, here's the former director, I forgot his name, he's a lovely guy, the former chief commissioner of the Human Rights Commission, federal, said, this is all, you know, it's horrible, it's ridiculous. And I think they know damn well that there's absolutely no way that any of

this will withstand a charter challenge. And the point of this is- Maybe. Well, the point of this, and this is the case that he makes that I think is persuasive, is they're just trying to scare you. They're just trying to shut you out. They're just trying to put you on notice. Well, they'd succeeded with me. Well, you haven't shut up. No, but I really thought through Bill C-63.

I've already had my fair share of trouble with the Ontario College of Psychologists, because they have weaponized, they have allowed activists to weaponize their complaint process. And what could be done to be under the auspices of Bill C-63, make what happened with the college, who I've managed to successfully battle off so far, look like nothing. Here's how what we've been discussing, particularly anti-Semitism, directly relates to this concern of yours in the matter of Bill C-63. And it also directly relates to how I've been attacked for merely noticing that a lot of what we've heard about mass graves, this archipelago of mass graves across the country,

residential schools, it's a fiction. Hmm. There is a proposal, and it's supported by the Justice Minister, Arif Farani. Yeah, he's fun. He's a lot of fun. Yeah, he's everything you'd hope he'd be. To insert a concept called residential schools denial fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's everything you'd hope he'd be. Insert a concept called residential schools denialism. Yeah, right.

Which is an absurd abstraction. To insert it into the same section of the criminal code that outlaws incitement against the Jews by Holocaust law. Yeah, that's perfectly in keeping with the way they view it. And this is all about just shutting people up. It's all terrifying. Well, that's- And the other one, and I think we didn't even talk about this,

the most pernicious, is this recent construction of anti-Palestinian racism. Yes, as hate speech. Well, yeah, but if you look at the definition of it, and again, Trudeau says he's willing to adopt this in some form, as has the Justice Minister said the same. The standard definition of anti-Palestinian racism devised by the Arab-Canadian Lawyers Association, which I've never heard of before and I think this is all they've ever done, is any utterance of a conventional Zionist standpoint cannot but be understood as anti-Palestinian racism. Right, right.

The way it's defined. So, that would include support for the fact of Israel's existence. The mere support for the fact of Israel's existence as a Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land. That if you confront or deny or dispute the Palestinian narrative, if you dispute the Nakba, if you deny the right of Palestinians their claim to title of all of historic Palestine, then you are engaging in anti-Palestinian racism. In other words, then you're a Zionist. Yeah.

Okay, so let's tie that. You're the mildest of the mildest kind. Let's tie that into Bill C-63. Yeah, well there it is. Well, so in Bill C-63, there's a provision, which I've read several times, that if I am afraid, because that's the language in the bill, that Terry might utter something hateful in the next year, so let's say that would be your support for the existence of Israel, then I can bring you in front of a provincial magistrate and he can fit you with an electronic

bracelet and you can be confined to your home for a year. And all of your social media posting will be disallowed, and whoever you see will be regulated, and, and this is something I just can't figure out at all, it's so preposterous that it beggars belief, you will be required to donate body fluid on a regular basis to your physician to have it monitored on a daily basis. I wasn't aware of this. Absolutely to make sure that you're not consuming anything illegal or anything intoxicated.

Now I think what happened- Okay, that is beyond the pale. It's in there. That is beyond the pale. No Jameson's. Yes. Well, I think the reason is- I'm going out to get a gun license. Where the hell did they get this? But I think probably where they got it from was legislation on domestic abuse.

Because if you want to mitigate the probability of domestic abuse, limiting the abusers' alcohol consumption is actually a logical move. I'm not claiming that on ethical or legal grounds. I just mean that alcohol does increase the probability of abuse substantively. And I can't imagine where else they would have got the idea, but that's in that bill in black and white. So we have not only hate crime. I don't think, okay, apart from the fact that the liberals are history, apart from the fact

that Trudeau is a dead man walking, quite apart from all that, I don't think there was any serious expectation that any of these laws, these initiatives would survive a charter challenge. It's all about intimidation. Think that was true with C-16? All about intimidation. And I think one of the things that our friends in Hong Kong, in the democracy movement, insisted upon was, do not obey in advance.

Do not obey in advance. Whatever they threaten you with, just say what you need to say and what you mean to say and bring it on. Let's have you then. Let's see the whites of your eyes. And I think that's the position that we all have to adopt. Yeah, well, it's hard to… I think all of that stuff is going to… it's gone. It's in the dustbin of history.

Well, I… So, you're hoping you're… You're being foolish by running off to America. You should stay in Canada. I have many other reasons for being there. but you see, I wonder about that, because my experience with the Ontario College of Psychologists, I would say, suggests otherwise, because none of my professional colleagues, including physicians, with pretty much zero exception, have stood up publicly and said that what's happened to me is wrong, and I know why. Are they afraid? Of course they happened to me is wrong. And I know why.

You're afraid? Of course they come to me privately. And why are they afraid? Well, it's very, very simple. They're afraid because the professional colleges have unlimited power of regulation over the members of regulated professions, which is pretty much what my Supreme Court challenge denial indicated. And if a professional is brought to task, let's say, by their professional college and loses their license, then they're terrified. And I looked at C-63 carefully, and it would produce a parallel bureaucracy, a bureaucracy

that would regulate the speech and conduct of all Canadians in almost precisely the same way that the professional colleges regulate the speech and conduct of regulated professionals. I don't think Canadians would stand up. I've seen no evidence that they will. So now, I do understand that Trudeau's on his way out and Canada... Well, I think Canadians would, but it's a very good question about whether or not the professional and managerial cast would. Well, I think we've seen the answer to that question.

I'm not saying this with any... I'm not happy about this. There's no pride in this. I think it's appalling. You know, and I've talked to many physicians in particular because it's mostly physicians I've talked to who are terrified of the Ontario College of Physicians, for example, because they'll make their life.

I mean, this bloody court cases for me has gone on eight years. It's eight years. It's cost me like $600,000. And it's not like I'm winning. Like they can't take me out because I have independent sources of income and a reasonable public voice. But you have to be in a pretty unique position to be able to withstand that sort of lawfare for that amount of time. Like I don't practice as a clinical psychologist anymore,

and that became impossible in like 2017, just like being a professor became impossible. So like these, the forces that can be brought to bear against you if you dare open your mouth are more than most people can or will bear, and I can see why. You know, I had three sources of income when I opposed Bill C-16 and I lost two of them. Right, the third one was entrepreneurial and it was under my control, but two was a lot and three would have been catastrophic. And so if you only have one

and that's your professional practice, well, it's not surprising that people are cowed and intimidated into silence. And so, okay, well we have to wrap up on the YouTube side and I think what we'll do on the Daily Wire side is well, we'll continue our discussion about Canada. I'm curious about your thoughts about, well, the Conservatives under Pierre Pauliev. I want to know what you think about him. I want, you said that you're, you know, habitually an optimist and that you're still optimistic about Canada in general. There are reasons to be optimistic. I mean, Canada is a remarkable country and the run of the mill Canadian is a decent and law abiding orderly trustworthy person.

And that's not trivial. But there are some serious cracks in the foundation more than I've ever seen in my lifetime by a lot yeah I mean you named five of them and you know and as we said we deprioritized the Quebec sovereignists right so you can see how and then they've been a fundamental threat to Canadian integrity for like 40 years so on the daily wire side let's turn our attention to Canada's future, dire and positive, you know,

because we could flesh out both alternatives. And I think for you international people who are listening, you know, the reason to be concerned about Canadian politics, which have actually become of some interest internationally in the last nine years is because like the Jews In Canada and in the US maybe in the West worldwide Canada is also a canary in the coal mine because Justin Trudeau is a poster boy for the progressives worldwide and whatever strange political tangents were

Meandering down in Canada are Isomorphic with the political threats that exist in the UK and the United States, although now less to some degree, Australia, New Zealand, the West in general. And so delving into what's happening here and how that might be rectified is a, what would enterprise that might be worthwhile on the international front as well. So join us on the daily wire side if you're inclined to do that. Terry, thank you very much. It's a pleasure. Yeah, really nice meeting you.

I suppose very nice to meet you too. Thank you very much. Yeah, and I certainly appreciate the article in the free press. That's kind of you. I've been writing about, what would you say, pathological group conflict for a very long period of time, and it's a terrible thing to see it rear its head in Canada. It's a terrible thing, and it's very useful to draw attention to it, and you did that very effectively internationally, and it was very good of Barry to publish it as well.

And hopefully it'll clue more Canadians into what's going on and into the seriousness of that for the Jews, which is not trivial, as you pointed out, in and of itself, but also as a bellwether for just exactly where we're headed. Alright, sir. Grant, thank you very much. You bet. You bet. Good talking to you.