00:00:00.000Yes, the last time you and I spoke, it was actually at the trucker convoy that very first weekend when a lot of people in this country who felt they had not been heard, they were not being respected, and in the case of Justin Trudeau's comments were being actively disrespected, all these people said, you know what, we have to take a stand.
00:00:17.520And you were one of, at the beginning, a small number of members of Parliament that were prepared to go out and meet with these people. How do you ensure that the divisions that led to that don't continue, both inside the party and also just in Canadian society in general?
00:00:32.580Well, I think it's very important that when people are hurting, when they're traumatized, when they're trying to find solutions, and you have to remember many of these people, they reached out to their Member of Parliament.
00:00:46.240I received hundreds, probably, I would say, thousands of letters from people who were concerned about the direction of the country. And all they wanted is for their elected officials, whom they're paying their salaries, to listen to them. And some of them drove from clear across the country, from places like BC.
00:01:07.980And for me, it just wasn't, it wasn't too much to just listen to what they had to say. And I think that it was a very, very grave mistake, for our Prime Minister, not to listen and not to even, even, they have some of his ministers go and meet with them and listen to what they had to say, because they are regular Canadians, they work with their hands, they, they are concerned about the future of the country.
00:01:36.940Many of them are not sitting in their cottages with a MacBook on a computer during COVID. Some of them were out of work and the mandates and our policies directly affect them in different ways than it affects someone who's working in the office. And so I think it's very, very important to listen to their concerns.