Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper gives a significant interview to a conservative blogger, and it s great. We ll show you the highlights. It s November 19th, 2019, and this is The Ezra LeVant Show, where Ezra talks about why others should go to jail when you re a biggest carbon consumer.
00:06:28.800You know that Don Martin would disagree with everything Harper says, but it wouldn't be a genuine interview.
00:06:34.220It would be Don Martin reading a series of gotcha questions written by some other uniform media activist.
00:06:39.800Why would Harper even waste time on that?
00:06:41.720So without further ado, here's Stephen Harper and Ben Shapiro on populism, and how if there's too many people on the fringe, well, then maybe it's not a fringe anymore, is it?
00:06:53.140Yeah, this is a fight that I had with a lot of people who considered themselves populists, is that I looked at Europe, and I said,
00:06:59.060I don't want the American Republican Party turning into a European far-right party, because it seems like there is actually a distinction.
00:07:04.120And you obviously being from Canada, maybe you can either tell me whether this is correct or not, that American conservatism is of a slightly different brand than conservatism in Europe or in other countries.
00:07:15.260In that, based on the idea of God-given rights protected by a limited government, the essential assumption is that if something comes up, it is not the government's job.
00:07:23.280And populism sort of suggests there's a problem, and now it is the government's job.
00:07:26.860And so if there's a problem in your town and you've lost jobs in that town, now it's the government's job to step in and fix it.
00:07:34.400Well, if the government caused it, it is, particularly.
00:07:37.940And look, so we can debate whether certain movements in Europe are far-right or they're just kind of populist conservatives, or are they actually far-right?
00:07:46.840The question is, are they being fueled by legitimate grievances?
00:07:50.660And I guess I would argue, and I say I argue this as someone who ran the largest per capita immigration program in the world, I would argue that when you are letting hundreds of thousands of people illegally or irregularly overrun your borders, that is a legitimate grievance.
00:08:04.160And if you get any kind of a movement out of that, including a far-right one, don't point the finger at the people for voting for it.
00:08:10.120Point the finger at the policymakers who allowed such a crazy policy to bring about that outcome and fix the policy.
00:08:16.880You know, the one thing I would say that when people, you know, it's easy to condemn.
00:08:22.280In fact, I had a rule in my, you know, I united the conservative movement in Canada.
00:08:26.360I've been divided into historically two parties and various factions.
00:08:29.880But I always said, you know, if I got 1% or 2% on the right of me, that's fine.
00:08:33.740But when you get 5% or 10% or 20% or infamously with Hillary Clinton, 45%, 46%, and you're calling them fringe, there's something wrong with you.
00:08:42.840We live in a democratic society. You can't start condemning large segments of the population as fringe.
00:08:48.460If they're voting for that, you've got to address their concerns, and especially, as I say, if their concerns are legitimate.
00:08:53.600So you can complain about the policies of those, quote, far-right parties, but offer an alternative.
00:08:59.040Don't pretend they don't have a legitimate issue.
00:12:46.040Imbalances, by the way, yeah, you know, economists will say a poor country like China is bound to have a trade surplus with the United States.
00:12:51.880But it's not bound to get bigger as China gets more wealthy, which is what is happening.
00:12:57.120This is because you have a bad deal that provides grossly unequal access.
00:13:02.060And the consequence has been the outflow of millions of jobs from the United States, from Canada to China,
00:13:07.900with no discernible benefits to our working population.
00:13:10.980So as a populist conservative, or frankly, I would say as a conservative, you don't sign deals like that.
00:13:15.320You sign deals where you know that, overall, your economy is going to benefit and that lots of people in your economy are going to benefit.
00:13:22.060The countervailing case that's been made by particularly libertarians on trade has been,
00:13:26.440why would you tax your own citizens by essentially tariffing Chinese products in order to punish the Chinese?
00:13:32.520I mean, is the goal to have them lower their own tariffs, or is the goal to cut them out of the market because they're, quote-unquote, sucking our jobs out?
00:13:39.500The fact is that we've gotten a lot of cheap products out of China, and people tend to see that as a bad thing.
00:13:44.320But the fact is that consumer prices have been going down in the United States consistently on a variety of levels.
00:14:17.180And that's not the justification for trade.
00:14:19.500You know, even people, these libertarians will jump up and quote David Ricardo and classical economists.
00:14:24.700David Ricardo didn't say it would be a good idea for Britain to open its markets if it couldn't sell its goods anywhere else.
00:14:30.780He made the argument for reciprocal trade.
00:14:32.880And that is the core of the argument for reciprocal trade.
00:14:36.540And the idea that a trade relationship, no matter how badly structured, is somehow good for you, losing jobs, losing well-paying jobs by the millions to get cheap products,
00:14:47.680which, by the way, in most cases you could get from places other than China, is not an argument for the kind of trade imbalance we have seen and the kind of economic outflows we've seen.
00:14:56.160And that's, by the way, you know, obviously there's a separate question about China being a geopolitical and strategic rival.
00:15:02.220But even leaving that aside, that's not a good economic relationship.
00:15:06.240And the president, my view, the president not only is right, the president deserves a lot of credit as the first president willing to take on this.
00:15:13.900The current trade relationship with China is beneficial to a few well-connected American corporations who get to operate in China.
00:15:22.320But it's not beneficial to the economy as a whole, and something has to be done about that.
00:15:26.500Or we are going to see a situation where the Chinese is the largest, China's economy is the largest in the world,
00:15:32.420with a grossly unequal trade access to the United States, and that's not in anybody's interest.
00:16:15.740And the line at the bottom there, 6%, say it's not high enough, only 6%.
00:16:19.700Yet Trudeau is jacking it up even more.
00:16:22.740What I really should say is that Canadian conservative politicians don't have the courage to say even the most basic things about this crisis,
00:16:29.560even though 80% of Canadians say that immigration is fine or too high, and yet Trudeau is raising it in the face of their views.
00:16:38.400So Andrew Scheer, Michelle Rempel, they're AWOL on this subject.
00:16:41.780Only the new premier of Quebec, Francois Legault, has come close to criticizing immigration levels, and Maxime Bernier, too.
00:16:50.400Harper notes what they know, that it's not fringe to be concerned about these culture-changing shocks brought about by unelected elites.
00:16:58.740And even if Ben Shapiro gets cheap Mexican labor to do his gardening and housekeeping, it's still not a justification.
00:17:14.260We've got sort of the libertarian position that says, you want to come in and work, come on in and work, but you don't necessarily get citizenship.
00:17:19.500You've got the kind of far left and now mainstream left position.
00:17:33.620What do you think conservatives want to come down on that?
00:17:34.500Well, elements of a couple of those things.
00:17:36.860First of all, the Conservative Party of Canada is one of the few right-of-center parties in the world that gets a large percentage and sometimes an outright majority of the immigrant vote.
00:17:45.660So we're very distinct that way in a way that's very positive.
00:17:50.940I think one of the things that has made Canada, the United States, and our society successful is that we embrace newcomers who often, frankly, are often conservatives.
00:18:33.660Obviously, in modern day and age, the immigration system should be scoped primarily around the country's economic needs.
00:18:40.900There can be humanitarian and family considerations, but it's fundamentally about the economy and about building our society.
00:18:46.820So, look, I'm fundamentally – it's what I say about so much in the book.
00:18:49.940I'm fundamentally pro-immigration, just like I'm fundamentally pro-trade, pro-markets.
00:18:54.480But that doesn't mean that immigration is good no matter what.
00:18:58.460That having, you know, caravans of people invading the country would be a good thing.
00:19:03.340Or that you can live, frankly, what I would consider the libertarian delusion that people will come into the country, but somehow they will have no access to social services.
00:19:25.600Stephen Harper also weighed in on nationalism and patriotism, things that Trudeau and France's Emmanuel Macron both denounced together in the same day in Europe this month.
00:19:36.060I'm sure they cooperated on that timing.
00:19:42.420Let's start with sort of the perspective on nationalism.
00:19:44.800So there's been a big debate in the wake of President Trump about nationalism on the right.
00:19:48.560So there are some folks like Jonah Goldberg, I think I would count myself in this camp, who are very attached to the idea of patriotism but not nationalism.
00:19:56.000There are a lot of folks like Rich Lowry at National Review, again, one of our colleagues there, who's very attached to nationalism as distinct from patriotism.
00:20:03.040Do you see a distinction between nationalism and patriotism?
00:20:06.220So I argue in the book that a healthy nationalism is part of a healthy society.
00:20:11.820You know, I think the kind of the Germanys of the world where nationalism for historical reasons become kind of inherently suspicious is just, is frankly just wrong and wrong for conservatives.
00:20:23.160Now, in that sense, as I say, I'm using patriotism and nationalism as virtually interchangeable.
00:20:27.900I would agree that if you get kind of far-right nationalism that's essentially ethnic or racial in character, it could become a different kind of beast.
00:20:36.700But frankly, conservatives don't advocate that kind of nationalism.
00:20:45.200I think he's clearly warmed to Donald Trump, not necessarily Trump's personality, but his achievements.
00:20:50.860It's tough not to, especially if you're an economic expert like Harper.
00:20:54.060I think Harper has overcome the Canadian snobbery about Trump.
00:20:59.120I'm guessing Harper has also spent a lot of time recently with grown-ups and not a lot of time with the Unifor media and pundits in the past two years.
00:21:07.500I still like Ben Shapiro, but more for his campus battles against political correctness, taking on cultural Marxism and identity politics,
00:21:15.260than for his views on foreign trade, immigration, or Trump, which I regard as sort of never Trump and a little bit globalist.
00:21:22.540That said, would you agree with me that he's a better interviewer, as in he lets Harper answer, and he's smarter than anyone in the Canadian media party would be?
00:21:34.160I think I might get a copy of Harper's new book.
00:21:36.540It sounds better than I thought it would be, less risk-averse than I thought it would be, maybe even more Trumpy.
00:21:42.220I might see if Harper would agree to be interviewed by me about his book, but who knows?
00:21:46.820Maybe he's not quite that bold and populist, but I'll check.
00:23:51.520Well, that is a movie about Freddie Mercury, a larger-than-life rock singer with the band Queen.
00:23:59.520You may not know his story well, but you cannot have missed his songs from We Are the Champions to Another One Bites the Dust to his rock opera, Bohemian Rhapsody.
00:24:10.520It's an interesting story for those who love music, but it's got a bit of a politic to it.
00:24:17.520And joining us now to talk about this is our friend Joe Wormington, a columnist with the Toronto Sun.
00:24:25.520And it's interesting that we're talking about this subject because you wouldn't think that a movie about an entertainer would cross over into that nasty kind of Trump-like politics, but it has.
00:24:36.520Well, yeah, I mean, I have never gotten deep into Queen, but you've got to love the brio, the energy, the charisma of Freddie Mercury.
00:24:46.520I mean, he was over the top, but he had a style that was really like no other.
00:24:52.520And those songs, the reason they click is they have a sustainability to them.
00:24:59.520Well, the audience is a big part of the song.
00:25:18.520But you raised this with me, and you said, if I can paraphrase what you told me before we turned the cameras on, that you had heard bad reviews about this, and you didn't want to prejudge it.
00:26:40.520And, you know, I think that perhaps he wasn't, the story wasn't enough about the gay part of his life that maybe the critics would have liked.
00:26:48.520I don't know, but that's kind of what I'm reading into it.
00:27:39.520And I think would have been great at it.
00:27:40.520And it quoted him, and he was on Howard Stern Show talking about how, you know, he wanted to go more into the gay lifestyle, into the clubs in Berlin, and talk about Freddie's life there.
00:33:17.520You know what, and again, if this were just a movie about his biography and his music, critics wouldn't care about that, but they want him to be a political weapon.
00:33:26.520Now, you touched upon the racial epithet.
00:33:31.520He would say, no, I'm not from Pakistan.
00:33:34.520Did he ever deal with some racial or religious issues?
00:33:38.520Is there a political correctness there also?
00:33:40.520Well, you know, the movie addresses that, which I think is another reason why.
00:33:44.520His family and the people that, you know, the Parsi people were forced out of Zanzibar.
00:33:49.520And it says in the movie that it was by Muslim aggression that moved them out.
00:34:45.520I think I want to now because if it's a good musical movie, and the box office suggests it is, the clips suggest that the actor here hit it out of the park musically.
00:34:56.520I mean, imagine trying to walk in his shoes.
00:35:25.520You will have tears in your eyes because there's some sad moments and there's some dark moments.
00:35:29.520But mostly, it's a celebration of one of the greatest artists in the world and one of the people that helped raise a lot of money for a lot of people.
00:36:15.520Hey, welcome back on my monologue last Friday about Unifor announcing they will campaign against the conservatives in the next federal election.
00:36:34.520Betty writes, shouldn't Jerry Diaz be looking out for the rights of his union members on their jobs?
00:36:40.520Who asked him to meddle in political elections?
00:36:42.520How can Canadians ever expect objective reporting now?
00:36:45.520Yeah, well, not just now, but I remind you that in the last election, the Canadian Media Guild had a massive quarter million dollar campaign against Harper, too.
00:37:04.520I think the only thing that's new here is the brazenness with which they're showing their anti-conservative stripes.
00:37:12.520And I think Jerry Diaz, like so many union bosses, wants to be a political boss, but doesn't want to actually have to run and be subject to the will of the people, am I right?
00:37:24.520Nicholas writes, the memes are hilarious.
00:37:27.520This McLean's cover has been endlessly mocked all over social media.
00:38:00.520On my interview with Jack Buckby, Paul writes, Brexit in name only.
00:38:05.520May leads an establishment globalist party that calls itself conservative.
00:38:10.520Well, you got to remember that the conservatives only reluctantly put the referendum to the British people to take the wind out of the sails of the UKIP party.
00:38:19.520They were shocked when it went yes to Brexit. They were shocked.