The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre

Episode Date: January 2, 2025

Jordan Peterson sits down with Canadian member of Parliament Pierre Poilievre (and likely the next Prime Minister). They discuss his role as Leader of the Opposition, the untapped energy sector, the real reason Canadians cannot afford homes, how Justin Trudeau has walked the country off a cliff, and what will likely play out in 2025 leading up to the much-needed election. This episode was filmed on December 21st, 2024  | Links | For Pierre Poilievre: On X https://x.com/PierrePoilievre?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor On Facebook https://www.facebook.com/PierrePoilievreMP/ Website https://pierremp.ca/?_sm_nck=1 

You take the total business investment of the United States divided by the total number of workers in America, it's 28 grand. In Canada, it's 15 grand. The Canadian worker gets about 55 cents for every dollar of his American, and they're both measured in USD. In Vancouver, more money goes to bureaucrats than goes to the carpenters, electricians, and plumbers who build the place. And to add insult to injury, tradespeople who build homes can't afford to live in them. Why is it that we're still importing oil when we've got the world's third biggest supply? Why is it we can't export our natural gas?

I think that was perhaps the single stupidest thing I ever heard a politician say. Your federal government spent $6,000 of your family's money going over their budget. They've squeezed the taxpayer out of every last dime and they're still 62 billion dollars short. It's worse than that because I suspect that the true picture is a lot more dismal than we know. Okay so that's gonna be dumped on

you sometime in the next year. They get the party, I get the hangover. Eight years from now, what does it look like? like. Hello everybody. I had the opportunity and the privilege today to speak with Mr. Pierre Pauliev, who is the leader of Canada's Federal Conservative Party, but also barring catastrophe and, God willing, Canada's next Prime Minister. A transition in power in this country is likely to take place sometime between March and October or November of 2025. And it appears very probable that Pierre Pauliev is the heir presumptive and will be the next Prime Minister of Canada.

And so I talked to Mr. Pauliev two and a half years ago, which was quite shocking to me. I thought it had been more recently than that. And a lot has transpired in the meantime. What did I talk about with Pierre? Well, I think mostly what I did was give Canadians and people on the international side a chance to see who this man is in an hour and a half of discussion and the extra half an hour on the daily wire side. You have enough time to get a sense of how someone responds spontaneously and emotionally and cognitively to complex and challenging questions in a manner that's

not rehearsed. That's the huge advantage of the podcast format. We talked about all the stories that Mr. Poliev has heard in his thousands of event interactions with Canadians in industrial settings, in manufacturing settings, in academic settings, so that he could inform himself about the true situation that's facing Canadians struggling to make ends meet, despite their best efforts now, which is a dismal reality in Canada with its excessive housing prices and diminishing economy. Most importantly perhaps, what is his vision of the future that both threatens and provides opportunity for Canadians? How is it possible for the citizens of this great country to dig themselves out of the malaise and pit that has

been dug for them and by them over the last nine years and what could be done to remove the impediments such that this country could become the dynamic industrial powerhouse that it certainly could easily become. So join us for all that. So sir, it's been almost two and a half years since we sat down to talk the time before. So I guess the first thing I'd like to know is what have you been doing during that time? I'd like to hear about your day-to-day schedule and your week-to-week schedule, like about your day-to-day schedule and your week-to-week schedule, like lay out your job. Basically we have two parts to my professional life. It's very bifurcated. There's the Parliament Hill side, which is early morning meeting with my leadership team,

House Leader, Deputy Leader, WIP, et cetera, to plan out the day, the battle plan for our parliamentary committees, question period, etc. That is punctuated by one weekly caucus meeting and just the daily prosecution of the government, which is the quintessential role of an opposition leader. And then the other part to my life is touring. I asked my assistant today how many events we had done over the last year and he said it was exactly 600. I mean, a few weeks ago it was 570 something. So we've done 600 events and those are like tours at mills, mines, factories, farms, high

tech facilities. And we tour in, see how the place operates. Then I give a short speech, do a question and answer, and then I just mull about and shake hands with the workers for 25 minutes to an hour, and then I go on to the next stop and do it all over again. And we did that in nine provinces and two territories this year. And so that's a summary of my workload and work plan to do my job. And you said 600 events, you made illusion

when we were driving over here that the weekends are particularly packed, that you'll do like 10 events on Saturday or Sunday. Right. And so a typical event, what do you enjoy about the events? Why are they useful and what do you learn? Well, first of all, you get a practical insight into how the country actually works. Like who makes the widgets?

How do those get made? How does our supply chain come together? What skill sets do these incredible workers have? What background qualified them to be a licensed welder or to run a CNC machine or to be the CEO of a 300 person company that supplies parts into the American economy. And that practical insight I think is important if you wanna lead a government and a national economy.

So you learn a lot. Then I get to hear the stories of the people who work in these places and get their feedback on what they want, what their dreams and aspirations are. Yeah, I wanna turn to that in some detail. Let me ask you about the parliamentary side too, because I think it'd be useful for people to know

how you prepare for what you do in parliament. It isn't obvious to me that people exactly understand the business of being in opposition, you know, at a really practical level. How do you, what do you see as your major function? I know you're there to push back against the government and to question and criticize, but it isn't obvious how you go about preparing for that or how you decide what issues you're going to focus on and

how you distribute the responsibilities among your caucus and your broader team. So, you know, there's a lot of discretion. You make up your mind when you wake up in the morning. You read the news. I have a team that gives me a full briefing of all the published news from the mainstream media, all the news from the independent and ethnic media, all a download of the entire social media landscape. And then I respond to that by saying, well, I think these are the, we're going to, we have roughly 25 questions we can ask. And I'll say, well, we want 10 on inflation and three on violent crime and four on whatever the subject happens to be in the day.

And I want this committee to focus on this today and that committee to focus on that today and then our teams go out and we do it. And the – I've been very blessed because my caucus is extremely talented and they don't need a lot of direction, but we've been acting in unison and I think that's why our message is pumping out so clearly to people.

It's not a cacophony of sound, it's a clear drumbeat. And that's why people are hearing and appreciating our message. So you feel that your party is well organized at the moment. Extremely well organized. Okay, so what's your evidence for that? Well, by every measure, by every statistical measure, we're stronger than any political party

has been in, well, maybe in my lifetime, objectively speaking. Memberships, fundraising, poll numbers. Right, so people are positive in consequence of that. So it's a lot easier to lead an organization when it's successful, obviously. People are much more enthusiastic. Why do you think you're in that position? What's going on that's setting the stage for that? And I don't just mean the failures on the Trudeau side. I mean, what do you think you guys are doing right?

Well, we have a clearer mission statement and people know exactly why we're in this. Whenever someone asks me, they say, I'm thinking of running for parliament or for mayor or some other political position. What's your advice? Well, I say, well, before I get to the advice, I have a very simple question.

Why do you want this job? And it might seem like a simplistic question, but it's actually the most important question in life. Why? Why are you doing what you're doing? And our answer to that is to bring back the Canadian promise that anyone who works hard gets a great paycheck and a pension that buys them good food and a nice home and a safe neighborhood, that anyone from anywhere can do anything and that people are in charge of their own lives. That's effectively what we want to deliver.

So every day when I'm in parliament. So that's a very local vision in a sense, right? It doesn't have that, the grandiosity of an international utopian vision, for example. It's very down to earth. I think people are sick and tired of grandiosity. In fact, I think there's something grand about a family that can take, it can go on a nice road trip and share stories and build lasting memories that the kids will remember when they're 85 years old. Despite producing all that nasty carbon dioxide.

That's right. I think, but I think those things are grand. And I think with the problem we've had in this country and in all of the countries that have been afflicted by this horrendous utopian wokeism is that it's been focused on the grand, the grandiosity of the leadership of the egotistical personalities on top and not the things that are grand and great about the common people. And that is another reason why I think we're doing very well. People are saying, finally, there's someone who's focused on letting me take back control

of my own life and create a great future for my family. And so that is, to answer your question, one of the reasons why we've had such incredible success over the last two years. Okay, so there's a lot of distrust, generally speaking, in relationship to, I would say, establishment organizations and political elites all across the West. A lot of that well-earned. Why should Canadians believe that the vision that you just laid out is something that you hold personally dear and not merely, what would you say, a set of carefully calculated

campaign slogans? Well, I look back at everything I've done for my entire political career to the time I was a teenager. Some people even dug up my old university essays and I've been saying precisely the same thing the entire time. You know, when I was 20, I wrote an essay as Prime Minister I would and the title was Building Canada on Freedom. The entire piece was about making the government small and maximizing personal freedom.

That's basically what I'm doing now. So you have consistency going for you. When I launched my leadership race, I literally had same language in my leadership launch speech that I had put in that essay 22 or 23 years earlier. And when I was part of the Harper government, we basically fought for and did the same things then that I'm proposing to do now.

So as much as you can be assured of anything, any political leader says, I've got evidence to back it up. Okay, so one of the things that's been very distressing to observe, I would say, and I'm going to use the UK as an example. I mean, the UK had 14 straight years of conservative government. And, you know, as far as I'm concerned, thank God for that, because it could have been labor. But having said that, they fell 100% prey to the blandishments of the net zero types

and brought forward really a catastrophic energy policy. And the UK is suffering dreadfully for that. And their immigration policy, I mean, Keir Starmer apologized for it, which was something remarkable to behold. And so did Kemmy Baden-Oak, who now runs the conservatives in the UK. Now, the reason I'm bringing them up as an example

is because while they were a conservative government and they certainly didn't govern by anything approximating conservative principles. And so how do you feel about the probability that if the conservatives in Canada take power, that they'll be enticed into this global utopian delusion that seems to have enveloped so many leaders, kind of regardless of their political stripe.

What do you think, if anything, can inoculate you or has inoculated you against that? I know better. Well, elaborate. What do you mean? Well, I'm not going to do that. And it will be hard because the temptation will be, this is the mistake that conservative parties around the world have made countless times.

They think, well, anybody who's got a conservative mindset is already voting for me so I can go off and chase the ideas of my political opponents, and then everyone will love me, because I'll have the conservatives due to the fact that I have the name conservative, and then I'll have all these other people because I've embraced their contrary direction. And in the short term, it works,

because you're managed to have all of these people under and all of the different political ideologies captured in one tent. But the problem happens when the policies are a disaster. And then people wake up and go, oh, my God, my taxes are now up, my inflation is out of control, the deficit is spiraling, there's crime on the streets. So does the temptation exist to try and take on the political policies of the socialists in the short term? Sure, but it's one that I will fiercely resist because I know that by the fourth year of my mandate, people would be enraged because their lives would be even worse.

So it will be tough, though, like it's going to be a trade-off. You can see the temptation. I mean, I think many leaders fall prey to the temptation to shine on the international stage. Right? I mean, I can't remember who it was in the UK. international stage, right? I mean, I can't remember who it was in the UK. I believe it was the previous Labour Party leader who said that decisions in Westminster were essentially irrelevant because all the important things were happening internationally, right? And so if people are involved in status climbing and they hit the national pinnacle as always, then there's the international world to, you know, what would you say, to dominate or to impress.

And that's, I think that the power of that temptation or even of that peer pressure can't be underestimated. So, okay, so now you've been, these events, these 600 events that you've gone to, so let's say that's something approximating 1,000 to 1,200 since we last talked, You spent a lot of time speaking to and I presume listening to ordinary Canadians. I heard you made a speech in the heard you make a speech in the House of Commons that went viral in the last couple of weeks and you spoke very

persuasively on behalf of working-class Canadians. And so tell us what you've Tell us what you've learned what you've heard over the last couple of years and how that's shaped you and changed you, let's say, as you've moved from, well, as you shifted your position up the political hierarchy and are poised really likely to take the reins in Canada at some point in the next year. You've listened to all these people. And so what have you learned and what has it made you convinced of let's say well first of all people there's the bad news and the good news the bad news is that people feel like they've done absolutely everything right and their lives are trapped they know, young people say, look, okay, I went through, I got an education, I work nonstop, and I have made the calculation that there is no mathematical path for me to own a house.

It's just not possible. In Toronto here, for example, if you take the average income and the average house price, it would take you 29 years to save up for a down payment. So, you know, if you're a down payment, not to pay it off, forget paying it off. And so if you're a young woman who's got a biological clock, obviously, well do the math.

You know, you start off at, let's say you're 25. Well, you're gonna be in your 50s before you can afford the average house. So how are you ever going to have kids? And that's about the time when people think about downsizing from their house. That's what they used to think about downsizing. And, you know, they usually had their house paid off

back by the time they were in their early 50s. So just to show how dreadfully things have worsened, that's the picture of the youth. Then there's the kind of middle-aged people who do have kids already, and they're terrified of the dangers in the streets. I mean, our streets are just being overtaken by drugs and gangsterism and other dangers,

and they want safety again. And then you have business owners that are saying there's just no way to continue to compete in Canada. We have to look at moving and that means the next 200 jobs we create is going to be in Ohio or Florida or some other place than Canada. That's the kind of overview that I get. The good news, though, is that people do now have some hope. They think that things can be turned around, and they have

clearly and correctly diagnosed the problem, which is entirely political. There is no physical geographic reason why Canada should struggle to supply people with great opportunities of home ownership and family formation. In fact, we should be the richest country in the world. And people increasingly know that and they know that if we make the right, albeit difficult political decisions, that they will once again be able to do as their parents did, which is to say,

get a house, start a family, live in a safe neighborhood, raise their kids with good traditional values. That's another thing I'm finding is that a lot of people are really getting back to those values that we were told were unfashionable. Young people today, they want to have families. Yeah, well, there's been a real conservative swing, especially among young men. Well, no wonder, because they've been demonized for what, 30 straight years for every aspect of their masculinity, from their play preferences to their proclivity to destroy the planet with

their ambition. And so, there's definitely an opportunity there and clearly your political party and you are capitalizing on that, that you have the support from young people increasingly, right, across Canada. We are winning among youth. In fact, the youth were the first to come on board with me. My rallies were overwhelmingly populated with youth,

which is not normal for conservatives. And the reason is, is because in your youth, of course, as you write it, young people want to have the adventure of their lives. They want to go into the wilderness and earn a living and bring it home and raise kids and have a purpose that's bigger than just short-termism. And I think, you know, 20 years ago, the socialists would go to university campuses and say, vote for us and we'll let you be a kid forever. We'll give you free stuff and you'll never have to get a job.

And that was very temporarily popular across the Western world. But then young people woke up and found out this was not a utopia, it was a total dystopia. And that all the things that they really valued and wanted for their lives were impossible when they were being borne down upon by this massive state. They've learned that help is the sunny side of control.

And so now young people are, and I love this. This is great news. Our young people are saying, I want to start a business. I want to invent something. I want to create things. I want to become a tradesman. And then when I get good enough at that, I want to hire five other tradesmen. And by the time I retire, I want to have 300 employees.

And then I want to give that company to my kids. These are the stories that I hear when I go out and about in Canada. And the great news is we can have all those things. That's the optimistic message that I have for people. But we've got a limitless supply of resources here. We're like a cornucopia. You know, the third biggest supply of oil, fifth biggest supply of natural gas,

biggest supply of uranium, fifth biggest supply of lithium. We've got not one, not two, not three, but four coasts to tidewater. Right. We live next to the biggest military and economic superpower the world has ever seen. We have a highly educated population and the best system of system of government

in the history of the world, the parliamentary system. Not the best government, but the best system of government. So all these massive advantages, we just need to unleash that potential. Right, so the unhappiness that you're seeing among young people seems to me to be a consequence of the mismatch between the opportunity they see right in front of them and their frustration at the fact that that opportunity can't be capitalized on,

even if they're contributing their fair share. And they're definitely doing their part. Like they really are. You know, there's often, it's always been a habit of older people to say, you know, oh, the youth these days. When I look at the young people today, all they do is work. I'm astonished when I meet young university students, how much they work outside of their studies

just to scrape by. How many hours of labor they do as waitresses or in another service job so that they can pay their bills way more than when I was a student, 25 years ago. Well, when I was a kid in Alberta, I could work in the summer and I didn't work on the rigs. So I didn't have one of the high paying jobs. I had a more, what would you say, a job that was secondarily associated with the resource

economy. I could make enough money in the summer, in two months, four months, to pay for the tuition and my entire year's rent. Of course. Right, right, right. And now these kids are working 20, 30 hours a week in addition to a full course load And they look exhausted when I meet young people today. They are exhausted They have bags under their eyes and all they do is work and they the worst part about it

It's not that they're working all the time. It's that they don't see a light. Yeah at the end of the tunnel Well, that's a genuine breakdown of the social contract, right? Absolutely. Because the deal, like you said, the deal was supposed to be, if you do things right, you'll be rewarded. Yes. Right? And that's the intergenerational compact, essentially. And there isn't anything that defines hopelessness more clearly than seeing that if you do all

the right things, the pathway is paved to failure. Right. Right. Right, so that's so demoralizing. And you know, what's even worse about that is that the people who are most demoralized by that are precisely the people who would be most productive and hardworking. Because the ones that are sponging along,

they don't give a damn anyways, right? They're not losing any glorious future and they're not sacrificing for it anyways. But it's really not good when your economy is set up to punish people who are entrepreneurial and hard-working. And that's what it does right now. Okay, so let's delve into that a little bit. So I've been tracking economic statistics in relationship to Canada and sort of left me open-mouthed in amazement at our dismal condition. So from what I've been able to understand, the richest people per capita in terms of GDP per person, gross domestic product per person,

so that's total productivity, is Ontario. And Ontario inhabitants are now poorer per capita than inhabitants of Mississippi, and that's the poorest American state. So the inhabitants of Canada's richest province are poorer than the inhabitants of the United States' poorest state. And that's actually occurred primarily in the last 10 years. And because we were basically at parity before that.

And had historically been not quite as rich as the Americans with some blips above them, but pretty much tracking them one to one. And now it's 60%, something like that. And that's not all the bad news because it's 60% in terms of absolute wealth and a real state market that's twice as expensive approximately on average. Yeah.

Right. So now- It's really bad. It's really incredible. Like 10 years ago, the New York Times wrote an article, Welcome to Canada, home of the world's most affluent middle class. And in that article, the Times had calculated that median American and Canadian incomes were tied, and that Canadians were slightly better off.

Now, part of that was because the 08-09 financial crisis hit them harder than it hit us, but still, now per capita GDP in the states is $22,000 higher than in Canada, measured in USD, so that's about almost 30,000 measured in- Right, so that's a whole other income, essentially. That's a whole other part-time income. Exactly. Yeah. And then, as you correctly point out,

their real estate is significantly cheaper than ours. So their dollars go a lot further, correctly point out, their real estate is significantly cheaper than ours. So their dollars go a lot further even when you match up the exchange rates. And what's worse than that is that the leading indicators are even more horrific. And leading indicators, for example, are investment dollars because your wealth tomorrow is determined by your investment today. So if your employer, for example, is buying lots of new tools and technology, you're going to be able to crank out more widgets.

So you crank out those widgets, then you can ultimately make more income down the road. If you take business investment and divide it by the number of workers, the American worker gets $28,000 of investment measured in US dollars. This is per capita? Per worker. Or per year? Per worker, per member of the labor force. Okay.

So you take the total business investment of the United States divided by the total number of workers in America is 28 grand. In Canada, it's 15 grand. The Canadian worker gets about 55 cents for every dollar of his American, and they're both measured in USD. So how is the Canadian worker?

That's investment in future productivity? That's investment in machines, in technology, warehouses, factories. I see. Any capital investment that businesses make divided by the number of workers, that's the measurement. I see any any capital investment that businesses make Divided by the number of workers. That's the measurement. So now that means they're getting better technology better

new machines Better tools than our workers and they will be able to crank out even greater Wages for their people than we will unless we catch up with that Our productivity is another major problem. Right now, and productivity sounds complicated, it's actually extremely simple. You just take the GDP and you divide it by the hours worked in the country. So American GDP is $80.

So for every hour an American worker works on average, he or she produces $80 of GDP. In Canada, it's $50. That's every hour. So that means we have to work 60% more just to make the same amount and have the same level of income to buy food and housing. Now that sounds like a bunch of wonk speak that should all might seem like it only matters to someone staring at a spreadsheet or a graph or a chart. But in fact, that's reflected in the fact that our 2 million people are lined up at food banks because they can't afford food and 80% of youth can't afford homes.

And our quality of life is, and the things we can afford to provide our kids have fallen back so much. There's real, real life. It's pretty stark and easily comprehensible statistic. I mean, if you work and you produce $80 worth of goods and services in an hour, compared to working and producing 50, obviously that's a substantial shortfall.

Yeah. So, and is there a starker indicator of the economic disparity between the US and Canada than that? Or do you think that's the primary statistic? I mean, I think housing costs are another one. I mean, there was a study out just 10 days ago that has Toronto and Vancouver now, by far, the most unaffordable housing markets in North America. And so, you know, housing costs are 50 percent higher in Toronto than they are in Chicago, even though Chicago workers make 50 percent more money.

The same is true between Vancouver and Seattle. Seattle workers make way more than Vancouver workers, but housing is 60 or 70% more expensive in Vancouver. So on all of the measures- Right, so we're making less by a lot. By a lot. By a lot. And 30% of them are paying more by a lot.

Right, and most of that's transpired in the last 10 years. Yes, and we're paying the difference by accumulating enormous quantities of debt. Our households are by far the most indebted in the G7. When you take, you divide total household debt by GDP, we now have a bigger stock of household debt than our entire economy. We are more indebted as households than the Americans were right before the 2008 financial

crisis. So what we have as a model in Canada is we have artificial scarcity imposed by a very heavy and restrictive state, confiscatory state. That suppresses production. But in order to allow for consumption, we print money and borrow money and then flood the economy with that money. Okay, so that's another problem. So that's the inflationary problem. Yes.

Now, the problem with inflation, there's many problems with inflation, but one of them is that it particularly punishes people who are thrifty and who save. Yes. Right, right. So inflation punishes the people who are thrifty and who save. Yes. Right, right. So inflation punishes the people who forgo gratification

to invest in the future. That's right. Right, so that's a very bad idea. It's a horrible, inflation is the single most immoral tax for so many reasons. One, it takes from savers and people who are trying to be responsible, thus making it impossible to be responsible.

Because if you refuse to play the inflation game of borrowing money to buy things you can't afford, someone else inevitably will, and you won't be able to afford anything. So you ultimately have to act irresponsibly. It's like Milton Friedman was asked, what would you do with your money in times of inflation? He said, spend it. Right, right.

Like the first thing you want to do when inflation is out of control is to make sure you get rid of this thing that's losing its value. The second reason it's immoral is it takes from the poor because the poorest people cannot put, they do not have the ability to buy inflation-proof assets like gold and real estate and fancy watches

and art collections and fancy watches and art collections and fancy wines and things that go up with or even exceed inflation. So it's a very big wealth transfer from the poor and the working class to the very, very wealthy. A very small group of people actually get richer. So the socialist policies that provide goods and services to Canadians, let's say, or denizens of other countries, by printing money actually punish the poor brutally in consequence of the inflation that

they generate. Yes, I mean all the socialist policies in practice take redistribute from the working class to the super wealthy in practice. And I can prove that again and again and again. What kind of theory? In practice. Yeah. In practice, uh, in practice, they, with all the redistribution that happens in these so-called socialist countries ultimately goes from the working class to the super wealthy, that is the reality.

Okay. So, but just one last thing on inflation. There, the final reason why it's so immoral is nobody votes on it. The basic principle of our parliamentary system is the government can't tax what parliament has not voted. The people must, no taxation without representation, right? But no one ever votes to have the money printing happen. And so the inflation is adopted secretly. And you blame the grocer because groceries are more expensive

or your local gas station because gas is more, or your realtor because how is, in fact it was actually the government that bid up all of those things with money printing and you didn't even know about it. So it is silent, it's a silent thief that takes from the poor and gives to the richest people and destroys the working class and that's why I am, I want to crush inflation. We need a policy that seeks to just to stop inflation at all costs. Okay so what would you do to stop inflation? Well we stop the money printing.

And the money printing is just a means to fund deficit spending. Governments borrow to- Define the deficit, yeah, for people. So basically the deficit is the difference between what the government spends and what it brings in. It's usually calculated on a yearly basis. That's right. And the debt?

Well, the debt is just the accumulation of the deficits. Right, right. So the deficit right now is $62 billion. I thought it had a ceiling of- 41 billion, yeah. Wasn't that a ceiling? Yeah. I guess not, eh?

I guess not. And look, there are very real present day consequences for that. Deficits increase the money supply. And look, there are very real present-day consequences for that. Deficits increase the money supply. Central banks effectively facilitate that increase in the money supply. And that causes inflation. And it's why our...

I have a buddy whose family moved here from Italy back in 1973. His father worked paving roads, and his mother made sandwiches in a senior's home. They were able to pay off their home 10 minutes from Parliament Hill in seven years. Right. Their grandchildren wouldn't be able to save up a down payment for that home in 15 years.

And they will be university educated with all the advantages of having been here two decades. That is the consequence of the money supply growing vastly quicker than the stuff that money buys. So what we have to do is stop growing the money supply and start growing the stuff money buys, right? Produce more energy, grow more food, build more homes. We have to unleash the free enterprise system

to produce more stuff of value. And this is where we have to remove the artificial scarcity that the government is imposing on the population. Let's incentivize our municipalities to grant the fastest building permits in the world to build homes. Let's... And you have a plan for that in principle?

Yes. I mean, I'm going to say to the municipal governments, they either speed up permits, cut development charges, and free up land, or they will lose their federal infrastructure money. So they will have a powerful carrot-and-stick incentive to speed up home building. And the percentage of a new house price that's a consequence of government taxation and regulation? Well, in Vancouver it's 60%.

60%. Does that include the land and the house? Yes, that includes everything. So I'll tell you how they calculate it. C.D. Howe compared the cost of building a home to the cost of buying a home. Yeah. And he said, what's the gap between those two things? So they added up land, labor, profit for the developer materials, and they compared that to the sale price and they found the gap was $1.2 million. So that's $1.2 million of extra cost above and beyond the materials, the labor, the land,

and the profit for the developer. So where's that going? Well, the answer is development charges, sales taxes, land transfer taxes, the delays in getting the permit, time is money, the consultants, lawyers, accountants, lobbyists that the developer has to hire in order to get the approval. So in other words, we're spending twice, in Vancouver, we spend twice as much on bureaucrats than we do on all other things combined to build a home. More money goes to bureaucrats than goes to the carpenters, electricians, and plumbers

who build the place. And to add insult to injury, those tradespeople who build homes can't afford to live in them. Right. So what we need to do is slash the bureaucracy. And I'm going to say to the mayors, you're not getting federal infrastructure money until you slash your development charges,

speed up your permits. I'm going to take the federal GST off new homes under a certain limit and encourage the provinces to do the same. But we've got so much land. We should have the most affordable housing in the world. It should be dirt cheap because we have the most dirt. We just need to get the government out of the way.

The same goes for our resource sector. Why is it that we're still importing oil when we've got the world's third biggest supply? Why is it we can't export our natural gas overseas? You mean like to Germany and Japan, even when they ask. Exactly. And are offering multi-decade contracts at distressed prices because they's so much effort for energy. And we can't make a business case for that, famously. Yes, and then this is the opportunity.

I think that was perhaps the single stupidest thing I ever heard a politician say. And that's a really hard contest to win. Well, you look at the price of natural gas is three to five times higher in both Europe and Asia than it is in North America, which means there's a hell of a lot of profit to arbitrage in getting our product over there. In the last 10 years, the Americans have added, I think, six liquefaction plants. The Qataris have massively increased their production. Canada has not completed a single new

liquefaction facility. There's one that's supposed to come online soon in Kitimat that was approved by the Harper government. It's only now coming online. The Germans actually built an import terminal in 194 days from concept to completion. We've had direct formal requests for our natural gas 194 days from concept to completion. We've had direct formal requests for our natural gas from Japan, Greece, Germany, France,

and I'm probably missing some others. We have the fifth biggest supply. We have cold weather, which makes it much cheaper to liquefy gas. It takes 11 days to ship to Asia from BC. It takes 20 days from the US Gulf Coast. So it's basically half the shipping time. And you figured out a way to monetize cold weather. Yes, exactly. It's a very difficult thing to do. Exactly, which also will help with data centers,

data centers which we're going to need data centers for AI and blockchain and countless other things that we have the energy for. It takes tremendous amount of energy to power these data centers. Apparently a chat GPT inquiry is ten times more energy intensive than a Google inquiry. So I think it's 2.9 watt hours that is necessary to answer one chat GPT question. It's only 0.3 watt hours to process a Google search. So in other words- The thing about human brains is it turns out

that the remarkable thing about human brains is how smart they are for how little energy they use. Right. Right, whereas we're building machines that are super intelligent, but they're very energy hungry. Right, well we have a lot of artificial intelligence in government as well, but it's a different kind. Yeah, yeah, that's for sure.

But we could be powering these data centers with Canadian natural gas generators, with nuclear. We have the biggest supply of uranium. We invented the can-do. We have the incredible nuclear physicists and engineers. Sixty percent of Ontario's energy already comes from nuclear. So we could be powering these facilities and they're just beasts that are going to gobble

up electricity. Well, yeah, the tech companies are absolutely desperate for it. Right. Facebook, I understand they're looking at building their own nuclear plant to power... And Microsoft revitalized Three Mile Island. I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they bought all the power that it's going to generate.

We have about 250 data centers in Canada. We could do a hell of a lot more. And our secret sauce is our energy, our incredible supply of energy of all kinds, hydro, nuclear, natural gas, you name it. So let's unleash the production of these resources and bring all that money home. We can try to organize things so that energy superpower

wasn't an insulting phrase. Well, you know, National Bank did a study, if you wanna talk to these environmental loons that hate our energy sector, they said, great economist, Stefan Mariona, out of Calgary National Bank said, if we displaced half of the electricity demand that India will have added to its grid over the next 20 years by supplying our natural gas instead of them using coal, it would reduce global emissions by 2.5 billion tons, which is three times the emissions of all of Canada.

So in other words, by exporting our gas, which is half as emissions intensive as coal, we could do far more than we could even do if we shut our entire economy down and disappeared from the earth. So why don't we address the environment with energy abundance instead of energy poverty? Well, that's obviously the moral thing to do

with regards to the alleviation of absolute poverty as well. Because there's an environmental case to be made for that too, which I learned about about 15 years ago. If you alleviate absolute poverty, the people who are now comparatively wealthy, so say starting to move into the middle class, take a much longer term view of their lives and their children's lives and their grandchildren's lives,

which are now relatively assured, and they're much more likely to take environmental action at the local level. So it looks like the fastest pathway to a genuinely green and sustainable future is through the eradication of absolute poverty. And the most effective route to that is cheap energy. Right, absolutely.

So it looks like we could have a green future and eat our cake too, so to speak, and Canada could definitely be at the forefront of that. Absolutely. So, okay, so I want to turn back to some numbers. The deficit this year was $61 billion. That was last year's deficit. Sorry, last year, last year.

And there's 40 million people in Canada. So that's $1,500 per person federal overspending, and that's $6,000 essentially per family. So just for everybody watching and listening, your federal government spent $6,000 of your family's money last year going over their budget. That's just what they spent in excess of what they had originally budgeted. Right.

And that's on top of having among the highest taxes in the world, with our, you know, 53% highest marginal tax rate plus carbon tax plus high payroll taxes, plus high business taxes, plus high capital gains taxes. So they're taking in more money than ever before. They've taxed, they've squeezed the taxpayer out of every last dime, and they're still $62 billion short. And that's just one level of government, by the way.

Then the provinces have deficits that compound the federal one. So we have way too much government, and we need to reduce the size and cost of government and unleash the power of the free market. Okay, so it's also the case that, we haven't gone into diagnostics yet, but it's also the case that the Trudeau administration

has increased the federal bureaucracy 40%? In bodies, yes. In bodies, since its inception, right? But despite that, they've also radically increased the amount of money that they're spending on consultants who are about as expensive, they're as expensive as employees go as- Oh, they're way more expensive.

Yeah, as any employee you could ever possibly have, right? $600 an hour, something like that. Right, so they've massively increased the size of the federal bureaucracy, but also massively increased the degree to which they outsource the work that hypothetically the bureaucrats should be doing. And this is not, it sounds like one of those

sort of annoying things that bothers us all, but isn't very substantive. You know, you think these, you know, one guy is making 600 bucks an hour. that bothers us all but isn't very substantive. You think these, one guy is making 600 bucks an hour. We're spending $21 billion on federal government consultants alone. That's $1,400 per Canadian family in federal taxes just for consultants.

Per year, that's recurring. That's not a one-time cost. So it is an insane amount of money to be spending on that, especially when you have more bureaucrats to supposedly do the work. And arguably, they're delivering worst results than ever before. I mean, our border is more porous,

our military has been weakened, and our basic services— Weakened or devastated? Well, you could put it either way. I mean, it's been—I think it's definitely been weakened, and despite the heroism of the men and women who still serve, the political leadership has undermined it in every possible way. Right. Immigration, porous border. I think our per capita immigration rate exceeds that of the U.S., even given the U.S. open southern border.

Oh, by far. We had a population growth of 1.2 million in 2023. That's on a base of 40 million people. So it's an astonishing number of people to bring in in one year. Everyone now admits that this was a calamity for housing, the job market, and our healthcare system. Well, Trudeau himself walked it back recently. He walked it back.

With what was the approximation of a public apology. Yes. This is after he called everyone who questioned his immigration policy a racist. And then he adopted the policies that he was calling racist only a year and a half earlier. So. Okay. So that's a lot of, I just talked to Terry Glavin, a Canadian journalist this week too, and he did about a five-dimensional analysis of the trouble that Canada was in.

It was blackly comic in some ways because we realized at the end of the conversation or near the end of it that we hadn't even discussed the ever-present threat of the Quebec separatists and I was thinking, oh my God, like Canada is in a pretty dismal state when the threat of Quebec separatism is number sixth on the list of threats to the integrity of the country. Yes. Right, so okay, so now that's making a comeback too, God. Yeah, I know. I mean, the PQ is now leading in the polls in Quebec after they had been completely obliterated in the Harper era. Separatism was completely dead in Quebec and now it's making a resurgence and

ironically- It's run out of desperation than anything else. Well, I mean, it's interesting that the leader of the PQ has actually been making economic arguments in favor of separatism. They used to always try to avoid that because most Quebecers would say, well, clearly we'd be worse off economically if we left. But because Trudeau has been such an, and Freeland and the entire liberal gang in Ottawa has been such a colossal disaster for our national economy the separatists are now able to Make the argument that they would be better off separating from that calamity

Now I had to plan all along maybe I intend to reverse that argument by making our economy strong again But it really is astonishing to see how badly things have changed in every respect. Okay, so this has really transpired in large part over the nine to 10 year period that Trudeau has been governing. And so when you are trying to put your finger on what went so wrong, so calamitously wrong, what do you think the major contributors

were? I mean, there's a lot of hydras whose heads we're encountering at the moment. And I imagine it's relatively difficult to trace a causal pathway, but what did we do wrong as a country? Well, I mean, it doesn't, what I'm about to say is not a shock to anyone. We have a prime minister who is dedicated to an extremely radical ideology. It is just rehashed socialism that has been discredited again and again and again throughout the ages. And his basically authoritarian socialism has

guided him throughout his entire prime ministership. He believes in a state that controls every aspect of your life, your money, your speech, your thought, controls the economic, all of the industries of the country. And every time that has been tried, it is a complete disaster.

So there's no mystery involved. It is the same old disastrous outcome that results from the same old disastrous policies. Right, that have demonstrated themselves as disastrous continuously throughout the 20th century. Exactly. Okay, so one of the things that I think is particularly striking, I saw Stephen Guilbault,

who's probably the minister in Trudeau's cabinet, who's most fervently an enemy of the Canadian economy. Yeah, he describes himself as a socialist. Well, this is the thing. So he described himself as a socialist. And so for all you international people listening, Canada has always had a socialist party and that's the New Democratic Party, the NDP, which is currently run by Jagmeet Singh who's propping up Trudeau, all his protestations to the contrary.

And Canadians have always been, about 20% of Canadians have stably supported the socialists, the NDP in Canada, and that's been true since about 1962 or something when they first popped up as a federal party. Now, the liberals, and that's Trudeau's party, have been a centrist party, historically speaking, and they were the home of the classic liberals, all things considered. And they like to steal good ideas from the left

and from the right and chart Canada's course down the middle. The thing about Trudeau's liberals is they're not liberals, they're far-left socialists. And they came to power in the guise of liberals and that meant that their bloody, their government was fraudulent, technically speaking, from the beginning, because Guilbao, for example, obviously should have been a member of the NDP and not the classic, traditional Canadian liberals. But he didn't care because he knew that

had he run for the socialists, he would have ended up with 20% of the vote because that's what they always do and never had any clear pathway to power. And so Trudeau brought a bunch of people in who were so radically left that they left the NDP in the dust, essentially. And they'd been running the country

on false pretenses for nine years. And if you ally that with the fact that Trudeau is clearly, he clearly has narcissistic personality characteristics and runs the country, I think, as a testament to his own grandeur. It's something like that. And one of your caucus members recently stood up in the house and I think listed something approximating 60 scandals. I mean, I've been scandalized by that because my observation, I've been watching the Canadian political landscape for five decades and the Trudeau government has skated through at least a half a dozen scandals that under normal circumstances would have provoked an honorable government to resign.

And then that doesn't count the other 54. And so at the moment, Trudeau's grip on authority is very shaky. His deputy prime minister resigned last week in a cloud of catastrophic, surreal manipulation. He shuffled his cabinet this week. At least a third of his caucus doesn't have any confidence in him, but he's being propped up by the socialists, Jagmeet Singh in particular, who also continually

proclaims publicly that he is an opponent of the Trudeau government and is standing up against him while refusing categorically to do anything, to do the thing that's actually in his power to bring down the government. So do you wanna, I just can't understand this at all. So do you wanna walk us through this? Well, let's first of all shed a brief tear for Jagmeet Singh because the problem he has is that he's trying to be an NDP leader

and we already have an NDP prime minister. I mean Justin Trudeau is, he's actually much more radical than the traditional NDP. As the NDP themselves admit, the previous leaders of the NDP. Yes, he attacked the NDP, Trudeau attacked the NDP for being too conservative. Yeah.

But because he had the comfortable blanket of the liberal party, which governed for most of the last century, people didn't realize what kind of radical they were dealing with. The second problem Jagmeet Singh has is that all of his political ideology is implemented now. Yeah, right. And we're seeing it. Like, people look around and say, okay, this is what it looks like,

the utopia of the NDP has been spinning in the corner of parliament. They told us everything was going to be free and wonderful and just, and there would be... Racial equity. There would be unicorns and butterflies and rainbows, and this would be the utopia. Well, now all of their policy agenda,

all of their agenda is implemented and people look around and it's a hellscape. You know, we have 1400 homeless encampments in Ontario, 35 in Halifax, we have, hate crimes are up 253% in the last nine years. The military has decimated, wages are dropping. Like the list goes on. And so Jagmeet Singh is trying to disown that ideology,

even though that it belongs to him. And he's trying to make some, trying unsuccessfully to convince people that he's somehow different than that, when in fact Trudeau has only been doing what Singh would have done in his place. And so it is a classic for socialists, what they try to do is change their names and move on and try to forget, have everyone forget their past. And when I say that he had, socialists changed their names, I mean, you know, they first, they were communists, and then they became socialists,

and then they became social democrats, and then they became, they stole the world liberal, and then they ruined that word, so they changed their name to progressives, and then they changed their name to woke, and now they claim they don't want to be called woke anymore. The socialists always try to disown the things they've done because it's manifestly disastrous,

and that is what Singh is trying to do. While simultaneously keeping Trudeau's government going, he voted just a couple of weeks ago against a non-confidence motion that I put forward, which contains Singh's own criticisms of Trudeau in Singh's own words. So he voted against his own words to keep Trudeau in power. But I will remind people.

How do you account for that from a motivational perspective? I mean, the scuttlebutt in the Canadian press is that Singh is propping up the government for personal reasons, say, regarding his pension. Now, they're making a much more political case, but I can't understand how he can reconcile himself to himself because what he does is so at odds with what he says that it couldn't be more different. Like, if he allied him, the other thing I can't figure out,

maybe you can shed some light on this, is like, when Singh agreed to act as Trudeau's support, why the hell didn't he negotiate a cabinet seat? I mean, why didn't he make it into a formal coalition? I know that's not a traditional Canadian move, but it could happen. And so he sold his soul to Trudeau fundamentally, decimated his own party, and gained nothing in return,

including what he could have gained had he bargained properly. That's how it looks to me. And what do you think about that? I mean, he's not a very good negotiator, that's for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what we are seeing is the, all of these egomaniacs in both the NDP and what we now call the Liberal Party are turning on each other because they all want to disown their collective record.

They all of them want to say, oh, I wasn't part of this. Whether it's the outgoing finance minister, Freeland, or Mark Carney, who's been writing the financial plan behind the scenes, or Jagmeet Singh, they're all trying to say, I wasn't there, I wasn't part of it, I'm something completely different than what you see. And that is just an illustration of how much of a disaster their agenda has been. And I think that's why we're doing so well, and we're going to defeat them. And Canadians will give me a mandate

to take the country in a completely opposite direction. OK, so what do you see on the horizon in the upcoming year? I want to talk about two things. What do you think is going to unfold, well, even in January, I mean, once parliament reconvenes and what you expect from Trudeau in terms of his political action then what you expect as the Liberal Party tries to reformulate itself like I can't imagine a scenario not really where Trudeau leads Liberals into the next election. That seems to me highly improbable

It wouldn't surprise me if he has to be removed kicking and screaming so to speak But I'd like to hear your thoughts on on what are Canadians to expect in the upcoming months So Parliament's back in late January It will take some weeks to actually get a non-confidence vote onto the floor of the House of Commons Then we'll see if Jagmeet Singh's latest promise of voting non-confidence was as insincere as his prior commitments to that effect. When does his pension kick in? In February.

So he's now basically, he said yesterday that he would put forward a non-confidence motion at the earliest opportunity. Well, that's likely to be March, which is. Oh, that's convenient. Okay, so that's problems off. So really, so March is the earliest, as far as you can see that election could be called. Singh will not vote non-confidence

before he gets his pension, or at least he will not vote non-confidence in a way that sees the election happen before his pension or at least he will not vote non-confidence in a way that sees the election happen before his pension kicks in. So we won't have an election before very late winter, early spring. Then there's the possibility that the Trudeau resigns and then goes to the governor general and says, we need to shut down parliament while the liberal party then chooses a new replacement, a Trudeau

2.0. And so there would be a leadership race. God knows how long that would drag on for during- You think approximately in March, no earlier than March as far as you can foresee. Yeah, probably. And during which time we'd continue to flounder and twist, twist in the wind. And by the way, the Liberal media is all saying, well, surely you wouldn't want to trigger an election during the liberal leadership race.

Excuse me, the Canadian people are not obliged, 41 million people are not obliged to wait around while this party sorts out its shit. Like, these guys could have got rid of Trudeau a year and a half ago. They knew he was a disaster then. And now they say, well, we're low in the polls, so we have to get rid of him. Now, you didn't care when he was just depriving single mothers of food for their kids or doubling housing costs or unleashing crime in neighborhoods across the country. But now you're really concerned about getting rid of him because your poll numbers are down

and you want to keep your job sorry that's not a good reason to paralyze the entire country in the face by the way of a major negotiation with the incoming US president who enters with a massive and powerful mandate and a man who has proven that he can spot weakness from a mile away. So the country should not be forced to wait for the Liberal Party to clean up its own mess. They've had plenty of time to do that. What we need now is certainty, and the only way that can come is through an election

so the people can decide. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And so who do you see as contenders on the Liberal side? I mean, Freeland, I think, is gonna make a run for it. But Carney, do you think he's gonna throw his hat in the ring? Now, he famously rejected the opportunity to become Trudeau's finance minister. After accepting it, after accepting it.

Well, so the chronology that we're led to believe, based on sources who've spoken about it to the media is that Carney agreed to the job. Trudeau went to Freeland days before she was to introduce her fall update and said, I'm going to be firing you to bring in Mark Carney. And then when that blew up with her unexpected premature resignation, then Carney looked at it and said, I don't want any part of this.

And he crawled under his desk. And so he was happy to take the job when it looked like it was a clear path, but then when it was a messier path, he hid from it. Why would he have decided to take that job to begin with? Because it's a good question. Well, God, you can't imagine stepping into a more thankless role. Who would want to associate with these guys? Well, Carney already has a reputation.

It seems to me that if he has prime ministerial ambitions, he'd just wait for the Trudeau liberals to cataclysmically degenerate even further and then step in as the Savior. Look, he's going to try and distance himself now, but here's the problem. He signed on as Trudeau's economic advisor. It's an official role he holds today. Now he's gonna make one of two arguments. One, he's gonna say, yes, in fact, I was his economic advisor,

and therefore I am responsible for the $62 billion deficit and the catastrophic growth, the rising cost of living, or he's going to say, I wasn't really his advisor, I was just full of it. He has to decide, was he lying to everybody when he claimed he was Trudeau's advisor? Or was he telling the truth? In either way, he's got a major political problem that he is now totally inseparable from the Trudeau record. He supports the carbon tax. He supports the attack on our energy sector. He told me and a parliamentary committee that he opposed Canadian pipelines even though his company

has invested in pipelines in the Middle East and in Brazil. You know, he is part of the Davos agenda. He's just every bit as radical as Trudeau. The only difference is he's got a nice banker's haircut and suit and he wears navy blue socks rather than polka dot socks. But beyond the aesthetics, he shares Trudeau's entire ideology and he represents the status quo.

Okay, okay. So what do you see, let's do this. I wanna know what you see as, like, frankly speaking, I don't envy you your job. Or the people, by the way, in the Trump administration, because it's very glamorous at the moment for them but if they're going to cut government inefficiency in a serious manner they're going to be doing hard administrative labor for a very long period

of time. Now you're going to take the helm of Canada when there are five dimensions of trouble brewing and serious, more serious trouble on all of those dimensions than I've ever seen plague Canada in my entire life as a Canadian. And it's worse than that because I suspect that the true picture is a lot more dismal than we know. Yes.

Okay, so that's going to be dumped on you sometime in the next year. And so how are you gonna deal with that? Like how are you gonna deal with the fact that the easiest thing to do for Canadians and for the remnants of the legacy media will be to wait until the Trudeau government collapses completely, dumps the economic mess on your shoulders, and then two months later

proclaim that it's your fault. Well, and it will be later, proclaim that it's your fault. Well, and it will be your responsibility at that point. And so, like- They get the party, I get the hangover. Oh, you definitely are going to get the hangover. There's no doubt about that. And that's a formidable set of problems.

Now, as we've already pointed out, Canada has a tremendous number of natural and cultural advantages. But still, like has a tremendous number of natural and cultural advantages. But still, like there's a lot of now you have a Senate that's packed with liberal progressives, let's call it call them by their proper name. You have a Senate that's packed with progressive, you have a judiciary that's packed with progressives, you have municipalities all across the country that are progressive. Even once you win, there's going to be a lot of opposition to your movement forward

and you're going to inherit all these problems. So like, why are you trying to displace me from taking this job? And so, I mean, I wanna know why you think you're ready. Why, and it's been two and a half years since we've had this conversation like this. I know why you think you're ready. It's been two and a half years since we've had this conversation like this. And what's your plan and who are the people you have

in positions to implement your plan and why should Canadians have confidence in them? So my plan is pretty clear. We're gonna cut bureaucracy, cut the consultants, cut foreign aid, cut back on corporate welfare to large corporations. We're going to use the savings to bring down the deficit and taxes, unleash the free enterprise system. We're going to repeal C-69, that's the anti-energy law, to cause a

massive resource boom in our country and make it attractive for business to do the value-added work here in this country. So part of it's going to be growing out of this mess. If you take the debt-to-GDP ratio, the denominator has to grow. And that's why we need a bigger, more powerful GDP that can fund our country and diminish the relative size

of our debts. We're going to bring back a monetary discipline to bring down inflation, stop the money printing, and we're going to incentivize the municipalities to get building. But it's going to be a big fight with all of these things because there are so many vested interests that will be trying to hold us back, so many small economic groups that have profited off the status quo. They will be fighting against me,

and I'm gonna have to make, put out a call to Canadians that they have to stay politically active. They can't assume that simply by changing, by voting in an election, that everything is going to, all the problems are gonna reverse instantaneously. Like I will need people to put pressure on the Senate to adopt my economic reforms. I will need people to put pressure on the Senate to adopt my economic reforms. I will need people to put pressure on their mayors

and local counselors to get out of the way and let us build homes. I will need businesses to actually do their part. I mean, our corporate candidate is so completely incompetent when it comes to politics. They're going to have to start to fight for the policies that are good for their workers more aggressively, and I've said that to them. They need to fire their incompetent lobbyists and actually go to the people and make the arguments

for the reforms that I'm talking about. And are the businesses that you're talking to, these are larger businesses, I presume, do they understand your concerns? Are they on board with you? And are the businesses that you're talking to, these are larger businesses, I presume, do they understand your concerns? Are they on board with you? They're starting to understand because they know that what they have been doing hasn't worked.

Well, the energy companies have been towing the green line. Well, they're idiots. It seems to me to be a very bad strategy. They're idiots, they're complete idiots. The big five oil companies in Canada have idiot lobbyists. They have brilliant workers, incredible workers, but idiot lobbyists, and they've been trying to suck up for the last 10 years and did nothing to support the right policies in the prior years.

So that's going to have to change. The developers are going to have to inform people in the cities why housing costs so much. You know, how is it possible that Olivia Chow can raise development charges by 30% and nobody in Toronto knows about it? Well, it's because the builders have not made it known. And so the builders take the blame when the housing costs go up. I mean, sorry, you have to actually, politics is a participation sport, not a spectator

sport. So our business community is going to have to step up and make the argument for these changes or I will come up against a lot of political barriers. So my message to everyone is, God willing, I will triumph in the election, but the people who want the changes that I'm talking about are going to have to stay politically active to push them through and over the finish line. So one of the remarkable things that transpired on the American front and rather precipitously in the last three months of the election was that a remarkable team of people aggregated themselves

around Trump. And that, well that was heartening because each of those people had their own track record of stellar accomplishment, but it also helped decrease people's concern about Trump as an individualistic autocrat, let's say. Now, you're very well known in Canada, I would say, and increasingly internationally, I'd say that's less true of your team. And so could you tell us, like, can you point to some people who will be key

in your administration and highlight their, I'd like to know what you think their strengths are, so let's walk through the core elements of your team. And also, I'd like to know what you think their strengths are, so let's walk through the core elements of your team. And also, I'd like to hear a little bit about where you think you guys still need to learn and might need further development. Well, listen, I'll go through some of the names. For example, we've got Andrew Scheer,

who was the party leader a few years ago, but he actually did a good job as party leader and learned a lot in that process. He was the speaker of the House, and that's important in a House leader. He knows the rules of the game because a lot of the stuff that gets done or doesn't get done is the result of procedural maneuvers.

So you need someone who understands procedure and he understands it better than anyone. That's why I think our House strategy has been so successful. One of my former leadership rivals, Dr. Leslie Lewis, is our Shadow Minister of Infrastructure and she's doing a great job in talking about how we can rebuild the infrastructure

of the country. I think we've got newcomers like Jamil Javani, who was recently elected in an overwhelming mandate in Durham, and Melissa Lansman, our deputy leader, extremely well liked in Toronto, very well known across the country. She's been a terrific communicator, very smart. So these are very good people. And we're of course recruiting a whole army of candidates who are not yet elected in our non-held ridings

that will help me not just win the election, but govern if God willing we do. Who do you have on the energy side, federally? Well, we're kind of lucky in that respect that we have a huge Western caucus, right? We dominate in Alberta and Saskatchewan. So, you know, there's very few MPs in our Prairie caucus that don't understand energy,

because they all grew up with it, as you recall from your time as an Albertan. And they know what to do. And I've also planned to, I've talked to Daniel Smith, and I said, look, and Scott Moe, who's the Premier of Saskatchewan, I said, look, you guys need to be ready for, when I win, we need your help to reform

the approval laws so that we can get some resource projects going like immediately. And I speak for her, but Premier Smith from Alberta, who's a fantastic leader, has said she's happy to help. And she knows the energy sector inside out and backwards. And I'm talking to, for example, Greg Rickford from Northern Ontario. He's the guy who's been championing the Ring of Fire, which is all just the massive collection of minerals in Northern Ontario that we've been talking about mining for the last 15

years and hasn't been able to get approved. He's the one who's got the plan to approve that. So I've been talking with him a lot and you'll see more names come forward as we get closer to the election. Okay. Okay. So your fundamental plan is to eliminate obstacles, let's say bureaucratic obstacles, procedure obstacles, and to facilitate growth out of Canada's current malaise.

And you see that a lot of what you've talked about today is on the resource front. And so, and you have premiers who are going to back that. Canada is also a sophisticated nation. We're more than hewers of wood, let's say, and drawers of water and purveyors of energy. Why don't you talk a little bit about, let's presume for the sake of argument,

that you have two terms, eight years, let's say, which is not an, I think that that's a reasonable prognostication if things go at least moderately well, right? And so eight years from now, what is the candidate that you are planning to lead? What does it look like? I think it's a country where any young person can say, this is the place to start a business.

This is the place to take a risk and break through. It's a country where a country of adventurers, explorers, inventors, workers, people who are extremely ambitious and rewarded for that ambition. It's a place where not only do we graduate brilliant engineers in Kitchener Waterloo, where we do some of the best in the world, but they say, hell no, I'm not

leaving Canada. This is the place to be. This is where the best tech company is hiring the next 700 people. This is where I can get the best salary. And this is where I can keep most of my paycheck. Oh, and by the way, it's now affordable for me to buy a home here in Canada. It's a place where...

So that's the best rejoinder to the Americans, I would say. Fundamentally, you know, for Canadians who are concerned about undue American influence on Canada, the best possible rejoinder would be to make Canada a place so welcome to entrepreneurs that the U.S. would pale in comparison. That's a tall order because the Americans are deeply entrepreneurial and have a very business-friendly society. Right? Like at every level, right? They reward entrepreneurial activity. So I want to see that we, you know, for the first 14 years of this century, Canada had more American investment than America had Canadian investment. So in other words, we were winning the tug of war of capitalism with the greatest capitalist

economy the world has ever seen. And then from 2015 to present, there's been a net outflow of a half a trillion dollars measured in USD from Canada to the US. This is astonishing. Since when? In the last 10 years. Half a trillion.

Half a trillion, and that's in American dollars, that's 700-ish billion in Canadian, which is the equivalent of about a quarter of our economy has just left. It's Canadian investment. I mean, the government admits that the pension funds are now investing in the states. Canadian pension funds, Canadian RSPs, they're all invested, because that's where you get the best return right now. I want to bring that back. Right. So that's like $40,000 per Canadian, something like that. That's right. So why would we bring that back? $20,000 per Canadian, $80,000 per family.

But let's bring it back. Let's bring it back. Let's make this the best place to get a return on your investment. Let's make this the best place in the world to do business. To bring hundreds of billions of dollars of investment to dig mines, build pipelines, business centers, new tech companies, drill, high tech enterprises that you not only invent here, but you actually keep here because it's not just a great place to lose money, but a great place to make money.

That is the bright, optimistic future I see. I'm looking at models for this. Look at Ireland. Ireland, my grandfather came from Ireland about a half a century ago because Ireland was too poor. Well now Ireland's per capita GDP is twice Canada's. They're now $100,000 per capita GDP and Canada's $50,000. So what did the Irish do?

They cut taxes, they shrunk government. Government is only 23% of the economy, 40% here. Right, right. And so- They made it tech friendly. Made it very tech-friendly. So like 70% of the American, 75% of the Irish economy, excuse me, is free enterprise. And that's why they're just cooking with gas. Look at Singapore, Switzerland.

There are countless, Israel after the 90s becoming a startup nation, the recipe book is already written. We know what to do. Unleash free enterprise, remove the constraints, cut taxes, and allow people to prosper. That's it. Yeah, well I've heard great things about the tech graduates from the University of Waterloo.

They're phenomenal. People in, the people I know in Silicon Valley. Yeah, yeah. They're our biggest export right now. Yeah, well they feel that they're the equivalent at least of the graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology and I mean the Indians have had a massive influence in Silicon Valley.

And so Canadians, well that's only one place where Canadians are not making nearly the use of their resources that they could. That's on the human resource front with regard to engineers. Well, you think you graduate from Waterloo and you can pay 53% tax in Canada or 18 or 19 in Texas.

You can pay $1.5 million for an average house in Canada, or you can buy a castle for $400,000 in the States. You can make Canadian dollars, which is 69-cent equivalent of the US dollar, or you can make an American dollar. It's unfortunately, the pull is very hard, but why don't we get us pulling in the other direction? Why don't we make this the most attractive place for these brilliant minds to come out of these schools

and build it here and keep it here. And I think we can do that. Okay, so what are you gonna do when you take office? Like, what does that look like practically? So what could Canadians watch you do in the first months of your administration that would help reassure them that this is going to happen. And this is real.

Well, first of all, I'm gonna ask the carbon tax. It's been kind of an epic commitment that I've made. It's iconic, and so I have to follow through on it immediately, and that will signal to the country that I'm serious. Second, we wanna get rid of the GST on new homes and make past changes that aggressively incentivize municipalities

to get the building started. That has to happen immediately for people to notice any difference in the cost of housing by the time I get through my fourth year. We will have rapid introduction of the biggest crackdown on crime in Canadian history. A massive crackdown.

And what will that look like? A crackdown on crime. Basically, habitual offenders will not get out of jail anymore. Right, right. One percent of the criminals commit 65 percent of the crimes. Is that right? Yes. I didn't know that. Yes, well they, criminals specialize just like everyone else, right?

And the best predictor of offense in the future is repeat offense in the past. Right. Right, so. In Vancouver, they had to arrest the same 40 offenders 6,000 times in one year. Yeah, well that's exactly a consequence of that specialization. When we did this last time in the Harper government, we actually reduced crime by 25%. But interesting, this is a very big surprise, incarcerations went down because the people that we kept

in prison were in and out anyway. It was like the Hotel California. They were checking out, but they were never really leaving. So we had to basically save them a bed. But secondly, the small-time offenders were actually deterred. All of the so-called experts say deterrents don't work. No, they do work. Yeah, the best deterrent turns out to be probability of conviction rather than length of sentence.

And right now, though, it's worse than that. Even if you have a probability of conviction, there's a certainty that there won't be any real penalty. Right, right, right. So it doesn't matter. So that's not a real conviction. That's not a real conviction. So there's going to be a very serious crackdown on crime. Immigration, what's the scoop there?

Oh, we have to slow down the numbers. There's no doubt about it. We have to end the fraud and the international student and the temporary foreign worker program. We have to... Well, Canada historically had a very effective immigration policy. We just have to get back to the best system in the world, which we had for 150 years. Even in the United States, both Democrats and Republicans used to say, they'd get up at a microphone and claim they were gonna replicate our system because it was an undeniable success.

Immigration was not even controversial before Justin Trudeau because it was so well managed here for so long and we just need to get back to that system. It was clearly viewed as a net benefit by the immigrants and by Canadians. Absolutely. And in fact, the support for immigration was strongest in kind of the rural resource and agricultural communities where the labor was most needed and welcomed.

And people integrated, they arrived here. And while they were, we said to people, look, bring your traditions and culture and your stories, but leave the problems at the door. And so, and this is by the way, a history for Canada that goes back hundreds of years. I mean, the Protestants and Catholics were ripping each other's eyeballs out in Europe for centuries. And then they came to Canada and they got along.

They ultimately ended up intermarrying and integrating completely. And, um, you know, whether you were, uh, an orange man or, uh, uh, or an, uh, a Catholic Irish Catholic, you, you, over time, you got along with your neighbor. And, uh, you know, in the last nine years, we've seen that's come apart. The foreign, foreign conflicts are now spilling onto our streets. I want to put an end to that. I want to say, look, we're not interested in the world's ethno-cultural conflicts. We welcome people... That's the shadow side of multiculturalism. We welcome the people who come from places that have been afflicted by war as long as they leave the war behind. And frankly, that was... most people come here to get away from those things.

So by getting back to a common sense of values and identity and reminding people that they are, when they get here, they are Canadian first, Canada first. Leave the hyphens. We don't need to be a hyphenated society. We need to be- Right, so we can abandon the post-nationalist

state rhetoric and presume that Canada does have a Western identity founded on the a priori principles of Western democracies. And that that is a uniting ethos for the people that come here. Absolutely. And that we owe a debt of gratitude to the giants who came before us, who fought in wars, who laid down a parliamentary democracy, and who left us behind this incredible inheritance. Built a culture of trust. Yeah.

I mean, we're going to be grateful again, and we're going to inculcate the values of gratitude for our incredible history, build up the country, celebrate what we have in common rather than dividing, obsessing about what divides us, focusing on the shared values that make us all Canadian. And I think in so doing, we can, and by the way, put aside race, this obsession with race that wokeism has reinserted. Well, invented even. Invented in many ways. When I moved to Toronto,

it was as race blind as any country, as any city could be. Right. Right. And that's flipped. And it's flipped because of that obsessive concern with race, right? That was something we 100% did not need in Canada, right? It's, we basically, what would you say, imported and invented racism in Canada, right?

As a consequence of policy. Wokeism seeks to divide people into these different groups and subgroups and we see the results in a 250% increase in hate crimes. But we're going to get back to the basic principle that people are judged based on their individual character and humanity rather than by their group identity. And that is actually, ironically, the most unifying thing we can do to bring our country back together.

And as Lincoln put it, to bind up the nation's wounds. Alright, so we started the conversation with a description of the manner in which the intergenerational compact that makes up the nation had started to become violated or frayed, right? You said that young people in particular, you talked about middle-aged people and business people as well, but you said young people felt that even if they did act responsibly

and even if they did undertake the adventure of their life, the entrepreneurial adventure of their life, that the probability that they would be successful, even in the centrist middle-class manner that Canadians had become accustomed to, that had become what? That had become an unlikely outcome. And so your vision, it sounds to me, is to at minimum restore that social contract so that young people who are interested in adopting responsibility and taking some risk

can be assured that that will meet with success. And you think that you have the team that's in place that can make that possible. Yeah, so what have you, let's close with this. How are you a different person than you were two and a half years ago? I mean, um, I would say I'm tougher. What does that mean? Tougher? It's like you watch a boxing match and you see these guys get hit again and again and again. You say, how is it that you can take a punch?

The average person takes a punch like that on the street, they'd collapse. Well, once you've taken a bunch, you know how to take a punch. And when you run for leader of the oldest and biggest political party in the country and you're trying to challenge the vested interests, then you're going to take a lot of punches. And I have, and I've withstood those punches. And as a result, I feel stronger now than I did when I started. OK. I don't feel I have, and I've withstood those punches. And as a result, I feel stronger now than I did when I started. I don't feel I have beaten down.

I feel emboldened and strengthened from that, running through that gauntlet. Right, right. So that hasn't demoralized you? Not at all, no. In fact, to the contrary, I feel more invigorated than ever before. Why?

Because I think, because I have a mission there, you know, it was, was it Frank Cole that said, he has a why can withstand any what? Any how. Any how, yeah. Any how, yeah. And I have a why, I know why I'm doing this and I want to get this done for the country and I want to leave behind the opportunity for every other Canadian the chance I had as a kid.

And it's personal for me. I don't come from a privileged or wealthy background. I was adopted by school teachers, grew up in a normal suburban neighborhood. We didn't always have money, but I was able to get here. And my wife's the same story. She came here with nothing and she's had a great life.

Her family's had a great life. I love that about this country. And the idea that I could restore that as my life's work for other people, to me that is exhilarating. That excites me. If that could be my the only thing I do with my career, that would be an incredible, incredibly rewarding outcome. Right, right. All right. Alright, well thank you sir. It's very good to talk to you. Hopefully it won't be two and a half years before we speak again.

No, we should do it more often. Yeah, well it's a very good forum for apprising people of your plans and your progress. And also, on behalf of all Canadians, I want to thank you for your immense courage and the personal political price that you personal political and non-political price that you have paid for standing up for your convictions and defending freedom of speech,

because I know you have paid a very big price for that, but you have never bent, you have never backed down, you've had a spine of steel, and there are countless other people who will have the freedom to express themselves because you paid the price for them. So thank you. Well, thank you, sir. It's been a privilege, far more than a price, definitely, and it continues to be that way. All right, so for everybody watching and listening, I'm going to talk to Mr. Paulyev for another half an hour on the Daily Wire side, as you know, and I think probably what we'll do there

is drill down a little bit on Canada-U.S. relations. The DW audience is very American-oriented, and so that seems to be perfectly appropriate, and it's something that we didn't cover in any great detail on this side of the conversation. It seems particularly apropos, given that Trump has been making jokes about Trudeau being the governor of the 51st state, and has also threatened to put 25% tariffs on Canada, which I think is more of a ploy than a genuine threat, but it's definitely something that needs to be discussed. And so we'll talk about the trials for Canada

of having the Americans as their Southern neighbor, but also the immense opportunities that go along with that. So while we occupy the same continent, so it'd probably be best if we got along, you know, swimmingly. So that's what we'll discuss on the Daily Wire side. So be more than welcome to join us there. Thank you again, Sir.

Thank you. Thank you.