00:14:54.660they're interested in the virtue signaling. They may not follow through on it with, you know,
00:14:59.480even if they make a pledge, they may not follow through an action. But unfortunately, they're
00:15:03.320still allowing this fraudulent process to go. What I think needs to happen, we need a coalition. I'd
00:15:09.140call it a Clexit. You had the Brexit. We need a climate exit from the UN treaty. We need countries
00:15:14.400to band together and just say, hell no to net zero. It's anti-human. It's insane. It's Soviet
00:15:20.160style central planning. We're done. We're not part of this anymore. Donald Trump, of course,
00:15:25.800tried it, but he did it tepidly. He just withdrew us. He didn't withdraw us from the whole United
00:15:29.420Nations climate process. He didn't withdraw us from funding the UN panel and all that stuff.
00:15:34.260We need actually Donald Trump to triple down. And hopefully if he gets elected, he will. I don't
00:15:38.740know who elected, but that's the problem. So what's happened here is all this virtue signaling
00:15:43.620for decades in the green agenda, they got away with. But now we're hitting where the rubber hits
00:15:48.160the road solar wind collapsing we have at least a dozen offshore wind collapsing in the us the ev
00:15:54.240mandates collapsing all the global automakers saying no it's not working they're piling up on
00:15:59.200our lots we're not going to do more you have the energy collapse in europe with hastened by the
00:16:04.160russian war now israeli conflict all of this is just they can't afford the virtue signal anymore
00:16:09.840but the un knows how this works it's a campaign cost so they double down and face of all of this
00:16:15.840insanity, they wanted to phase out of all fossil fuels. And by the way, I went to fashion shows
00:16:21.140there. They had red carpet events, sustainable clothing and fashion. I asked the spokesman there
00:16:27.480at the UN with their keynote speaker about the C40 Cities report sponsored by Google, Ikea,
00:16:33.640funded by Mayor Bloomberg, who was the chairman, about the limit of three new items of clothing
00:16:37.880per person per year by 2030. And their answer is, well, it depends. If you're getting synthetic
00:16:43.580clothing, yes. If you're buying hemp-made organic clothing, maybe from the skin of a cockroach,
00:16:51.140then yeah, you can get more than three. This was an insane conference. They had children's events,
00:16:56.380all the usual stuff you would expect, but everything is just so much more insane.
00:17:00.440And the overriding theme, by the way, was this bypassing a democracy. Because right before it,
00:17:05.960the 200 medical journals wanted to declare climate a public health emergency. The Biden
00:17:11.080administration is being urged to do it. What that would do is take this even further out of
00:17:15.480democracy. Because remember, we didn't vote to ban gas-powered cars. We didn't vote to ban meat
00:17:19.900eating. We didn't vote to ban agriculture, restrictions on high-yield agriculture. But
00:17:24.760it's all just happening because of corporate government collusion through edicts. And if
00:17:28.180they get a climate emergency, whether it's through the WHO or whether it's even in the United States,
00:17:32.800it gives Biden 130 new executive powers. NBC News actually said it would give him COVID-like
00:17:38.160powers, what mayors and governors had. And he's a lame duck. So this is always a tool on the table.
00:17:43.960Anyway, that's what the UN wants. It is, I call it the Great Reset Summit, because none of it had
00:17:48.720to do with democracy. All of it had to do with rationing energy, food, transportation, freedom
00:17:53.780of movement, so that they could be more in charge. And it was just nuts. And you had King Charles
00:17:58.720there, you had Al Gore, you had John Kerry, a funny stat. On John Kerry, though, let me bring
00:18:05.180this up because John Kerry is an example of how ideological this all is and you see the moving
00:18:10.420goalposts it used to be about emissions and then it became about temperature and now it's just about
00:18:16.140phasing out fossil fuels so the reason I bring up John Kerry here you have the oil and gas sector
00:18:20.880trying to meet them halfway and say well we're going to invest in carbon capture and John Kerry
00:18:24.860comes out oh no that carbon capture is nothing I think he called it the great facade because he
00:18:29.360just wants the industry to be obliterated and effectively outlawed. He absolutely does. John
00:18:35.880Kerry, first of all, his speech here before the conference was all about shutting down not only
00:18:42.080U.S. coal, but we had the petition to do the natural gas by U.N. delegates targeting the
00:18:48.100United States. So they take away coal and gas and we're left literally a whimpering nation begging
00:18:53.400China for what scraps, begging Venezuela, the Middle East. John Kerry has no problem with any
00:18:58.500of that because in his mind, ideological mind, his legacy for the world is going to be saving
00:19:05.280the planet. And he really thinks that in order to do that, you're going to break a lot of eggs
00:19:10.540to make this beautiful utopian omelet of some kind of world. And he's pushing that. He's also
00:19:15.760pushing, as you mentioned, carbon capture and storage. And the money going into that is insane.
00:19:20.340But here's the thing you have to understand. The Inflation Reduction Act, so-called in the United
00:19:25.100States was probably the most evil genius bill that we've ever seen passed by the United States
00:19:31.280Congress, certainly in the green energy environment. Unlike the President Obama's
00:19:35.860green stimulus of 2009, which was a boatload of money, I think it was like $70 billion.
00:19:40.740It got dispersed and then it sort of died out. So you had a lot of success stories and then
00:19:45.360these companies would go bankrupt and disappear and, you know, Solandra, et cetera. Yeah. But
00:19:49.720the difference with this, and here's the thing, Politico has a whole article there. European
00:19:54.460nations want to model. The difference with the Inflation Reduction Act, it bakes in for decades
00:19:59.620green mandates, subsidies, regulations that just keep kicking and kicking and kicking and kicking.
00:20:05.400So you're going to have companies, governors, legislators, states, everyone just sucking at
00:20:12.560that teat for decades to come on this money that's going to be completely reauthorized and reauthorized
00:20:17.440and reauthorized. And it makes the green agenda not go away like we had under Obama once the
00:20:22.600money runs out because the money is designed never to run out and this is what you use this this wealth
00:20:27.500transfer from the west to the south as being a feature and not a bug of this all yeah not yeah
00:20:33.100Otto Edenhofer who years ago said this was not about environmental policy this was about
00:20:38.700redistributing wealth by climate policy this has nothing to do with environmental I mean he was
00:20:43.640very explicit the whole IPCC basis and the climate treaty basis this is not about environment at all
00:20:51.060It's about creating what they see as equity in the world.
00:20:55.400And unfortunately, even though I would say climate skeptics, if you will, are winning.
00:20:59.880We just had a Nobel Prize winning scientist, Dr. John Clouser, who won the Nobel last year, come out and say climate basically is a is a he didn't see the word hoax, but he said basically was pseudoscience and it was nonsense.
00:21:10.700And he went on in The Washington Post actually featured it, you know, Nobel winner dissents on climate.
00:21:16.700I mean, I bet the reporter and editor who allowed that article to go with that headline has lost their job or been demoted.
00:21:22.980But none of that matters because they now post-March 2020 know the game plan forward.
00:21:29.500And the game plan forward is not about public opinion.
00:21:31.900They could care less that recent public polling, at least in the U.S., is showing skepticism and reaching new heights.
00:21:46.280They have corporate government collusion. We now have banks who are joining up saying they're not going to give car loans to people who want to buy gas powered cars in working in collusion with the ESG, with the BlackRock, with the United Nations and the World Economic Forum.
00:22:00.620And so we are citizens facing perhaps something we haven't ever faced this nakedly.
00:22:05.500They are just doubling down on raw power and bypassing a democracy with corporate government collusion.
00:22:10.660And that's what this UN conference was celebrating. That's why if you watched it, you were just like, this is insane.
00:22:16.020They're talking about phasing out fossil fuels.
00:26:23.620But you talk to ordinary people, you talk to Conservatives, and Mike Harris is an absolute hero.
00:26:29.440And I think Mike Harris, for a lot of the time, has not really had his story told the way it needed to be.
00:26:36.160And by that I mean he revolutionized politics in Ontario.
00:26:39.980He took a party, the Ontario Progressive Conservatives, which was always a very squishy, moderate, elite party.
00:26:47.180And he turned it into one that was very grassroots oriented.
00:26:49.940He had the Common Sense Revolution, a rather legendary roadmap and platform that was unafraid to tackle some very difficult challenges.
00:27:00.380And the Common Sense Revolution turns 30 years old, and Mike Harris's legacy is finally being put in what I think is an appropriate context here in a new book, which has been quite well-hyped, which is good for a political book, called The Harris Legacy, Reflections on a Transformational Premier.
00:27:16.980You can see it there and get it on Amazon and other places fine books are sold.
00:27:21.020It has some fantastic contributions from a number of characters, many of whom will be
00:27:41.860So let's start with the why now, because Mike Harris has for decades now, but now
00:27:46.960of public life every now and then he may pop up in an interview but why did you feel this was an
00:27:51.440anthology that 2023 warranted so i think uh the urgency of this uh maybe didn't get felt by others
00:28:00.880but during the period when premier ford named uh mike harris to be a member of the order of ontario
00:28:08.800it was his mini tempest in the media teapot and it became very clear that the only historical legacy
00:28:15.920that the mainstream media wanted to cover was Walkerton and Ipperwash. And I felt strongly
00:28:23.440that the real history was being kind of cancelled. And so, at the side of my desk during COVID,
00:28:29.520I started recruiting different specialist authors to help me kind of write the true historical
00:28:37.200record of the time, policy area by policy area. And I was able to recruit some fantastic talent
00:28:44.880from David Frum, through Jack Mintz, through Bill Robson. But I didn't just kind of ask Tories.
00:28:51.040I asked liberals, I asked Greens, I asked academics, I asked journalists who were nonpartisan.
00:28:57.680And the core takeaway is maybe the most intriguing part of this legacy. It turns out almost nothing
00:29:04.800he did was reversed. And so maybe all of this kind of mainstream take of, you know,
00:29:13.760Paris is a brief blip in the otherwise benign progressive trajectory of Ontario politics
00:29:19.680isn't right and that in fact through education and welfare and tax rates all the way through
00:29:26.720municipal reform and parkland creation and protection of the Oak Ridges Moraine just on a
00:29:33.200consistent policy area by policy area basis what Mike did turned out to be permanent and we're
00:29:40.960actually living in uh harris's ontario today i ran as a pc candidate in the 2018 election and and
00:29:49.760what was always so fascinating is you'd knock on doors and you'd walk up to this giant giant giant
00:29:55.840mansion of a house i'm exaggerating a little bit but by london ontario standards a mansion and
00:30:00.560you know the person would come to the door and be like i'm a teacher and we still haven't
00:30:04.160recovered from mike harris i'm i'm and you'd look at well you know your husband looks like
00:30:08.080like he's in the pool back there. And, you know, this house is pretty big, like, but there does
00:30:12.400seem to be this very revisionist approach that unions, public sector unions have about Mike
00:30:18.000Harris, in particular, which was that, you know, he just decimated them and crippled them. And
00:30:22.840when you say that nothing has been reversed of his legacy, I guess maybe there, there's a bit
00:30:27.680of truth that there is still some lingering effect in the public sector from what he did. But
00:30:31.300but where does that come from? Because I can't think of a politician that still has as much
00:30:36.200venom 30 years after the fact. I mean, even George Bush, I think, was viewed more favorably
00:30:41.700by people that hated him more quickly. But Harris never really got that.
00:30:46.020The intensity of the public sector union resistance to the changes that were implemented
00:30:51.520during the common sense revolution was visceral. And it actually started before Harris. The
00:30:59.340MVP government of Bob Ray tried to introduce something called the social contract, which was
00:31:05.200effort to save union jobs, but still control government spending. And it ripped that party
00:31:10.320apart. And in the course of that, I think he discovered he probably wasn't actually an NDPer
00:31:14.480himself. So the war began before we got there. And it just intensified when we did. Somehow the
00:31:22.240teachers union leadership convinced themselves they were all Arthur Scargill and Mike was
00:31:27.840Margaret Thatcher and they were the coal miners. And if they didn't fight back, they would be
00:31:31.840exterminated which of course given the critical function the public sector teachers unions perform
00:31:38.080in our system is absurd but somehow they've managed to maintain this intensity the core
00:31:44.720point in bill robson's excellent chapter on education is in fact that ontario kids scores
00:31:51.440on exams relative to other provinces and other countries in the world improved during this time
00:31:56.560and what's lasted standardized testing grade three grade six grade nine published results
00:32:03.160mandatory literacy exam before you graduate all of that component of what was in the Harris
00:32:09.120reforms of the time hated by the teachers or not it's still there and even when the teachers got
00:32:16.220what they thought was a more benign regime and McGuinty and when those things were not changed
00:32:22.080And nor was the centralized negotiation between the province and the unions, which was a revolutionary part of what Harris did.
00:32:30.940It did not go back to negotiation with 78 amateur boards of education up against the strongest and smartest and most sophisticated public sector unions in the world, I think.
00:32:41.400there was a time i mean if you go back now you know 20 20 some odd years where people were
00:32:47.840pushing him to move to federal politics and mike harris was being courted to run for the leadership
00:32:53.240of the canadian alliance now i mean obviously we i think a lot of people were probably happy with
00:32:58.020what ended up happening stephen harper winning and then eventually merging the parties but
00:33:02.200what was it that you think prevented him from trying to really parlay what he had done into
00:33:08.300in Ontario into something bigger? Because I think he did have an opportunity to do something. I mean,
00:33:14.180even if he didn't end up leading the alliance, he probably could have been a federal cabinet
00:33:18.260minister and had a bit of a different trajectory than he chose to, which was transitioning into
00:33:22.560relative obscurity after office. Yeah, so I think a couple of thoughts there. First of all,
00:33:28.420a key contribution of the Harris legacy was three of the most outstanding cabinet ministers of the
00:33:33.640Harper Governor, Flaherty, Baird and Clement, all of whom were blooded in the revolution and made,
00:33:41.080I think, significant contributions because they had already done big change at the government
00:33:48.360level in Ontario. I think, honestly, people underestimated just how hard the job was of
00:33:55.240implementing that common sense revolution. And when Mike stepped down, when asked if he had any
00:34:00.840regrets at that final Queen's Park press conference. And he answered, yes, he should have done more
00:34:05.880faster. But I think he was genuinely done. I think he felt like he had come with a mission
00:34:12.360he'd executed against the plan. As we now know in this book, what he contributed has led to the
00:34:21.180Ontario that honestly remains one of the most attractive places to move to in the world,
00:34:26.080if you can get here. And that's a lasting legacy, and I don't feel like he needed to do more in his
00:34:33.880own head. You will also see in this book two excellent contributions on what he did in federal
00:34:39.720provincial relations, one by the late Hugh Siegel and one by a former bureaucrat, Craig McFadgen,
00:34:45.660that shows, in fact, that Mike had a huge impact on the rebalancing of the Canadian Federation
00:34:50.520itself after the near fateful experience of the Quebec referendum. And that Mike had already
00:34:57.100done an awful lot on the federal stage as well without ever having, I think, felt the need to
00:35:03.420run himself at that level. I know you were obviously involved heavily in the 95 campaign
00:35:10.220in particular. Well, your bio says you were the message guy. Everyone knows titles are always a
00:35:15.880bit murky on campaigns. But I did want to ask you about his approach to messaging, because
00:35:20.600one of the criticisms that I've heard about Mike Harris, and I don't know if you would agree with
00:35:25.400it or not, is that he was so focused on the policy that he often didn't think about as much
00:35:31.340the messaging of it and the packaging of that policy. And I'm curious what your take on that
00:35:36.320was with your involvement in that campaign. And just in general, a 30,000 foot view now that you
00:35:41.360have the benefit of hindsight on his government.
00:35:44.480So I think the messaging of Harris was actually one of his strengths.
00:35:51.120Somehow he radiated kind of a sense of a normal guy who was tackling big projects and trying
00:36:00.280to get things done and then did what he said.
00:36:04.740It wasn't just the shock of coming from 30 points behind in six weeks to a landslide
00:36:09.480majority in 95. What you've got to remember was that in 99, there was effectively a second election,
00:36:15.880which was really a referendum on the Harris Conincense Revolution, and he won a bigger
00:36:21.640majority. And the messaging of Harris, I think, was tight and effective. But you're right,
00:36:29.000he was a policy premier. And that's not always the way to win. Some people can do it with the
00:36:38.360right image or the right tone uh i think of a politician who promised sunny ways and you can't
00:36:45.800remember much else uh and we may be all paying a price for uh falling for that uh but in the end
00:36:52.520uh harris had i think excellent messaging and strong policy and as we're watching the term
00:36:59.560common sense be uh given a new lease on life uh federally by uh the conservative leader now
00:37:07.880I think it's important to reflect on how the brand needs to be connected to content
00:37:15.400in order for it to be as effective as it was when Mike Harris used it.
00:37:20.680One of the big challenges in federal politics for the Conservative Party has always been the
00:37:26.360factionalism. You have to unite Quebec Tories and Atlantic Canadians and Albertans and rural,
00:37:33.480red Tory, urban, blue Tory, all of this. Ontario doesn't have as much factionalism. There still is
00:37:40.520some. And I'm curious, especially with where he came in the history of the PC party, a party that
00:37:46.940had had the much discussed dynasty and was not really a hard line, what we would call blue Tory
00:37:55.120party. How was he at that party unity factor? How well did he bring his supporters and members
00:38:01.480behind what he was doing? Well, it's probably one of the more controversial chunks of the book,
00:38:06.600but the discussion about how he unified the party by winning a one-member-one-vote convention,
00:38:12.740the first of those, was actually critical. He went into that first election in 1990,
00:38:19.720barely survived, picked up a handful more seats, but was still in third place.
00:38:24.980But because he had won in a one-member-one-vote system, he actually had the full support of the
00:38:29.480party. He did a masterful job between 90 and 95 in bridging the different factions of the party
00:38:37.020by bringing the top talent from across the different factions into his campaign team.
00:38:42.720And then I think allowing that team to create a strategy that worked for his personality,
00:38:52.640met his demand for policy content and then allowed the campaign to focus on things that