Juno News - ＂What's the future of conservatism in Canada？＂ Candice Malcolm sits down with JJ McCullough

00:00:00.000 I'm Candace Malcolm with True North and I'm very excited today to be sitting down with JJ McCullough.

00:00:10.000 JJ is a columnist with the Washington Post and he is also a prominent YouTuber with very interesting, amusing political commentary.

00:00:18.000 He used to write longer articles over at the National Review, but JJ, you just said that you're not doing that anymore.

00:00:23.000 Not so much.

00:00:24.000 So we're in Vancouver and I thought it would be a great opportunity to grab JJ

00:00:27.000 and talk a little bit about some of his more controversial views and the direction of the Conservative Party and conservatism more broadly in Canada.

00:00:35.000 So first JJ, thanks for sitting down with me here.

00:00:38.000 Thanks for having me.

00:00:39.000 Yeah, so I feel like you're one of these strange political commentators where you're both like your YouTube content is very like PG-13,

00:00:49.000 very like family friendly, friendly to teenagers and that kind of thing, like not controversial at all.

00:00:54.000 But then you have opinion pieces that for some reason just kind of like trigger other members of the mainstream media.

00:01:00.000 And I would say like, you know, the Laurentian elite in Ontario and maybe Montreal.

00:01:06.000 So which one is the true JJ? Are you the kind of funny political commentator or are you the controversial sort of polemicist?

00:01:14.000 I mean, I think I'm just myself, you know, and I just try to be my true self.

00:01:18.000 You know, I'm my true self on YouTube.

00:01:20.000 I'm my true self on my columns.

00:01:22.000 You know, I mean, I guess I it's really weird for me actually to think of myself as somebody that's controversial because I don't think of myself as an overly provocative person.

00:01:30.000 I don't think of myself as like an Ezra Levent type who like wants to be controversial and feeds off of controversy.

00:01:36.000 I just think of myself as someone who likes being honest, who likes telling the truth as I understand it.

00:01:42.000 You know, when I make my YouTube videos, I'm sharing facts about the world.

00:01:46.000 I do sort of light political analysis.

00:01:49.000 But then when I'm doing my columns for The Washington Post, when I'm doing columns in, you know, National Review like I used to or when I'm beacon off on Twitter, I'm being my true self as well.

00:01:57.000 I'm performing a different sort of function.

00:01:59.000 But, you know, I am what I am.

00:02:01.000 And I've my whole political career, my whole media career, I should say, has just been based around being my authentic self and people can take it or leave it.

00:02:10.000 And I guess a lot of people are happy to leave it.

00:02:12.000 Well, I think that's the case with almost everyone.

00:02:15.000 That's kind of the great thing about all the social media platforms is that you can really seek out who you like and who you want to follow.

00:02:21.000 I love following your Twitter feed because I feel like you just come out and say it.

00:02:25.000 There's no beating around the bush.

00:02:26.000 Sometimes I'll be kind of thinking about something, you know, for a column and JJ is like right out saying things like they are.

00:02:33.000 So let's go through some of your sort of more controversial positions that a lot of them I don't find controversial myself,

00:02:39.000 but maybe that's because I'm not part of the Laurentian elite.

00:02:42.000 So I think the main thing that I remember you writing about the first time I heard about you was you kind of taking aim at the sort of anti-Americanism,

00:02:51.000 that the strain of anti-Americanism that runs on both sides of the political spectrum in Canada, both in the liberal and conservative side.

00:02:57.000 And you just sort of didn't see it that way.

00:03:00.000 So can you walk us through your views on that?

00:03:03.000 Well, I think it is the most toxic force in Canadian culture, even more than just Canadian politics.

00:03:09.000 I think, you know, that this country in many respects has anti-Americanism in its deepest core.

00:03:16.000 Like it is very difficult and I'm sensitive to this.

00:03:19.000 It is very difficult to articulate a sense of Canadianism that is not always in some degree engaged in a game of compare and contrast with the U.S.

00:03:27.000 that always is supposed to let Canada coming off looking better and America looking worse.

00:03:32.000 And I feel like so much of that is just based around, you know, falsehood, exaggeration, stereotype, dishonesty. 0.98

00:03:43.000 It's all based around sort of presenting America as this like evil, sinister, deeply dysfunctional, ignorant, you know, hate filled. 0.86

00:03:52.000 Just it's like it's cartoonish and it's just so obviously false. 0.88

00:03:55.000 And I've always ever since I was young, I've always had a sense that it's false and that it's cartoonishly false.

00:04:00.000 And it's animated by a kind of insecure that insecurity that Canadians have.

00:04:04.000 And so I've always just liked pushing back against it.

00:04:07.000 I mean, I guess I said before that I don't see myself as a controversial person, but I guess I do see myself as a bit of a contrarian person.

00:04:14.000 And I like forcing people to sort of confront their own ludicrous beliefs. 0.82

00:04:19.000 And I do think that anti-Americanism is quite ludicrous. 0.99

00:04:22.000 You know, when people say like, oh, I can't go down to America, like they'll shoot you there, you know, like, oh, they're all fat. 0.96

00:04:28.000 And America's never done anything good.

00:04:30.000 And Canada's like, you know, the real moral superpower of the world.

00:04:33.000 And it's like there's so many arguments like America's obviously a really great society.

00:04:37.000 America has done so much good for the world, whether it's, you know, technology, medicine, entertainment, you know, you name it.

00:04:43.000 You know, not even getting into like America's good role in global affairs, global diplomacy, all of these sorts of things.

00:04:50.000 So I don't know. I just I find it just an endless source of exhaustion how anti-American Canadians are.

00:04:56.000 And I'm always going to be on the side of America because I really do feel that so much of what this country has, we have by virtue of the fact that we're next door to America.

00:05:04.000 And I think that the fact that Canadians cannot appreciate what a virtue that is, is really it's it's it's sad.

00:05:10.000 It's really a tragedy, I think.

00:05:12.000 I just correct you one thing because I think some Canadians, I think like over well, I don't know what percentage, but for myself, I have family on both sides of the border.

00:05:20.000 And going down to the States was just like, I mean, you know, things are slightly different.

00:05:24.000 You know, they have different candies and different whatever names for certain things.

00:05:27.000 It was always amusing to see, like, what do Canadians say?

00:05:30.000 What do Americans say that are different?

00:05:31.000 But fundamentally, it's very, very similar society, culture, all the things.

00:05:35.000 Obviously, we have different histories. 0.88

00:05:37.000 And yeah, the idea that somehow, you know, what what what America is doing is so wrong is it's like a very historically ignorant perspective. 0.82

00:05:46.000 I'll give you an example.

00:05:47.000 I was reading back like a biography of Lawrence of Arabia after the First World War.

00:05:52.000 There was like a division between what's now today Iraq and Syria.

00:05:56.000 And they they just wanted the French and the English out. 0.99

00:06:00.000 And they were actually like the people at the time were advocating for America to come in and help be the kind of like broker between the peace talks because they just had so they wanted like they were done with colonialists.

00:06:12.000 And they saw America as a sort of like non-colonialist power that was neutral and good and a force for good in the world.

00:06:18.000 And so, you know, to just only look at like U.S. foreign policy from like post 9-11 and to forget like everything else that has happened, you know, in creating like a free and peaceful world and, you know, free markets around the world that brought so many people out of poverty. 0.83

00:06:31.000 It's like this very ignorant way of looking at it. 0.99

00:06:34.000 And then also, like, I see the same thing where people are like, oh, Americans are dumb. 0.99

00:06:38.000 It's like, well, they also have the world's greatest institutions. 0.99

00:06:41.000 Like, do you think the people who graduate from Harvard and Yale are dumb? 0.98

00:06:44.000 Like, you know, like there's just such a straw man kind of argument. 0.98

00:06:48.000 Yeah. And I mean, and, you know, thousands and thousands of Canadians immigrate to the U.S. every year and start lives there and become enormously successful in academia, in science, in business and what's tech?

00:07:02.000 Yeah, sports, entertainment.

00:07:04.000 Yeah, like you can go through the line. Right.

00:07:06.000 And, you know, and these these people, I think, are successful in part because they learn to turn off that part of their brain. Right.

00:07:14.000 They are genuinely ambitious Canadians who want to be successful in life and they they don't allow themselves to think of America in this one dimensional stereotypical kind of way.

00:07:24.000 They understand America as the place where the good things are.

00:07:27.000 And, you know, they're chasing their personal ambition and they, you know, sort of are willing to engage with that kind of stuff.

00:07:33.000 It's the small mindedness of Canadians who instead, you know, sort of wallow in these sort of one dimensional stereotypes and cliches and ignorance that they sort of, you know, you see this all the time. 0.95

00:07:45.000 Like, you know, a group of Canadians get together and it's the easiest thing in the world to just sort of say, oh, America, you know, health care sucks.

00:07:52.000 And like just and I think that we as Canadians all have an obligation.

00:07:56.000 Well, these Canadians that think like you and I do to push back against that a little bit, because I think it's just like I mean, it's it's, you know, I guess it's kind of like a form of bullying.

00:08:05.000 Right. Like you pick on someone that often doesn't have the capacity to defend themselves in that context.

00:08:10.000 Obviously, America can defend itself. But in that context, Canada, in the context of Canadian culture, Canadian society, America has very few advocates.

00:08:18.000 I think in the political world, in the journalistic world, in sort of the broader sort of cultural space.

00:08:23.000 And I guess I've just taken it upon myself to be an American advocate in the context of Canada using whatever tools I have at my disposal to make that argument.

00:08:32.000 Yeah, no, and it's great. I think it's much needed.

00:08:34.000 You know, even if I didn't agree with you on that, just someone to push back against.

00:08:38.000 You know, we all agree that America is the worst. So it's like, you know, you could have at least one person who's willing to defend it.

00:08:43.000 That would be my criticism of like all of the Canadian mainstream media.

00:08:47.000 Like, like imagine having a panel where they actually had like a pro-Trump voice.

00:08:51.000 I mean, not not because we'd agree with that pro-Trump voice, but just to hear like, you know, the policies that he's doing.

00:08:56.000 It's not just that he's enforcing them because he's an evil person.

00:08:59.000 He actually has some rationale and may or may not agree with it, but let's at least hear it out instead of just completely kind of brushing over it.

00:09:08.000 I you mentioned in your in your last discussion a little bit about health care and how Canadians kind of just think private health care is bad because that's what the United States has.

00:09:18.000 Public health care is good because that's what Canada has. But when you look at like the outcomes, I mean, Canada doesn't really do that much better than the United States in terms of like a lot of the actual procedures and, you know, affordability, accessibility, all that kind of stuff.

00:09:33.000 So, again, it's like another issue that's like a third rail, like you're just not really allowed to.

00:09:38.000 Yeah, and you're not allowed to talk about it because of the American issue. Right.

00:09:42.000 So it's like you're absolutely right. Like when you look at international rankings of the Canadian health care system, the Canadian health care system is not ranked very well internationally.

00:09:50.000 Like it's not considered up there with Europe. Like I think we'd like to imagine ourselves.

00:09:55.000 Or even better, like I think some people think that Canada has the best health care in the world just because it's universal and free.

00:10:00.000 But I think there was an OECD ranking that had the United States, I think I think it was out of 19 countries.

00:10:05.000 The United States was ranked 19 and Canada was ranked 18.

00:10:08.000 Yes, yes, yes. No, that's a very it's a very important point. Right.

00:10:11.000 And so it gets into the the idea that when Canadians are having a conversation about health care and the supposed merits of our health care system,

00:10:18.000 it's not really a conversation about health care. It's a conversation about anti-Americanism.

00:10:23.000 It's a conversation about superiority and and how much better we feel, you know, because it's it's sort of.

00:10:29.000 Canadian health care is analyzed in the context of a sample size of two, Canada and America.

00:10:35.000 And the American case study is not even a real case study.

00:10:39.000 It's like this cartoonish caricature extreme that the politicians and the media sort of, you know, the dying on the street if you can't have your I remember they used to have these ads on the radio.

00:10:49.000 I mean, they were telling you to get health insurance when you go to the US travelers insurance, which is a good thing.

00:10:55.000 But, you know, like the way they presented it was this sort of like caricature of like how when you show up at the American hospital, the first thing they want is your wallet.

00:11:02.000 And like like these kinds of things like that's the cliche that you're sort of forced to engage with.

00:11:07.000 And I think that, you know, it's just important to be able to push back against that a bit and to sort of say, well, what are the true facts about the American health care system?

00:11:15.000 And that doesn't mean that we have to adopt that system ourselves, but let's just be grounded and realistic and understanding that the system is not complete garbage.

00:11:24.000 Right. Which is one of the reasons why, you know, you have, you know, why something like getting Obamacare passed was very difficult because, you know, like a lot of Americans are very defensive about the system that they have.

00:11:35.000 And they're not defensive about the system that they have just because, you know, they're ignorant, brainwashed, you know, hicks who don't know any better. 0.68

00:11:41.000 No, like there's a lot of ways in which the health care system status quo is working for a lot of working Americans who get their insurance provided by their employer. 0.67

00:11:48.000 And, you know, and there's a lot of ways in which the Canadian health care system is obviously not working for Canadians and that there are aspects of the way in which it is not working for Canadians precisely because it is a public system that is so overly sentimentalized that the politicians are too afraid to reexamine it critically

00:12:10.000 or to introduce any sort of reforms because they've kind of conditioned the public to believe that any role for the private sector is Americanization of the system.

00:12:20.000 And so it's really kind of this horrible dilemma in which the public has been whipped up by the politicians for electoral purposes to believe one thing about the health care system.

00:12:29.000 And then those same politicians secretly know that it needs reform that they cannot sell to the public because the public has been, you know, whipped up into believing that any reform is Americanization and thus bad.

00:12:40.000 So like this is an example of how the sort of the cultural cult of anti-Americanism is actually like actively preventing Canada from pursuing the kind of common sense rationalistic policies that would be in the best interest of all Canadians.

00:12:54.000 Well, and so what do we do about that? I mean, you're stuck in a situation where the Canadian health care system is going to be wildly unaffordable when baby boomers retire. 0.99

00:13:01.000 We have issues where people don't have access to the kind of care they need, like if it's a specialization, which is why I would say, you know, in the US, it's not a perfect system and there are people that are excluded, which is something that needs to be addressed.

00:13:14.000 But when it comes to the best service on the planet in terms of the most advanced technology, the kind of pushing research that's going like pushing towards, you know, solving complicated medical cases or going towards like solving complicated diseases.

00:13:30.000 It's all coming out of the top US universities because they have the private funding and because they're connected to these very expensive hospitals.

00:13:37.000 So in Canada, we have the situation where we're just stuck and we can't have an honest conversation and we can't address a looting problem.

00:13:45.000 Like I think health care is like a third of our federal budget or something like that.

00:13:49.000 And it's like, you know, how much further are we going to let it go before we just admit that, you know, this isn't really feasible?

00:13:56.000 Is it going to have to come to a situation where it goes bankrupt or we're going to learn to have to have the civil conversation about public policy?

00:14:03.000 No, I mean, it's a very good it's a very good point that you're making, you know, in every election, this is a remarkable sort of thing.

00:14:09.000 In every election, whenever they poll the Canadian public, what is the issue that matters most to you?

00:14:14.000 The top two is always the economy and then health care.

00:14:17.000 But there is no issue that is discussed less in the context of Canadian politics than health care.

00:14:22.000 Yeah, we never talk about it.

00:14:23.000 But the public has anxieties about it that I think are very real.

00:14:26.000 You know, I think that certainly when you I don't know if it's the case back east, but certainly the case out here, like a lot of the hospitals are just clearly not high quality institutions.

00:14:36.000 Like there's a lot of access problems, as you've said, you know, the famous waiting times are in fact infamous and are in fact true.

00:14:44.000 As people get older and they see what it's like to try to get a specialist and how long you have to wait and and the quality of care that you receive when you finally do get to see someone like these are very real concerns and the public has very real anxieties about it.

00:14:57.000 The politicians know what it would take to address some of those concerns, which would involve some degree of opening things up more to the private sector and allowing, you know, frankly, people that have the means to pay for more coverage for themselves, thus freeing up the public sector to provide more service for the people who can't afford to pay.

00:15:17.000 Right. That's this is one of the sort of the problems with the Canadian health care system that I always get back to.

00:15:22.000 And I think it gets back to a sort of larger problem with Canadian society and the anti-Americanism is that there are a lot of aspects of the Canadian sort of sort of system.

00:15:36.000 Health care being a good example where it's basically a kind of subsidy for a kind of middle class lifestyle. Right.

00:15:42.000 So like there's a lot of middle class people in this country who have the means to pay, you know, a monthly premium or something like that for a higher quality of of

00:15:51.000 care or just for the coverage of care that they're receiving right now.

00:15:55.000 They could easily afford to pay something out of pocket to to sort of feed into the health care that they receive.

00:16:01.000 To like enhance their own.

00:16:03.000 Or just even to keep the system solvent.

00:16:05.000 Because in British Columbia you pay a monthly premium.

00:16:06.000 We did, although the NDP government has covered it now.

00:16:08.000 And it was very symbolic and very contentious even when it existed.

00:16:12.000 But the point is that the reason why, you know, we don't, why you can't do that kind of thing is because Canadians have been sort of told that the system that as it exists right now is a free system and it should be a free system.

00:16:28.000 And that somehow the freeness of the system is a reflection of the virtue that we have as Canadians.

00:16:35.000 Like that we are such a perfectly compassionate, welcoming, generous people.

00:16:39.000 And that's why the health care system is free.

00:16:41.000 And that's why.

00:16:42.000 So like even though I might have the means to pay for some portion of my own health care costs, I shouldn't have to pay.

00:16:49.000 Not because I am, you know, selfish and self-interested and just don't feel like parting with my money for something I could easily afford.

00:16:55.000 It's because I'm so great and I'm a great Canadian and I'm so compassionate that I shouldn't have to pay.

00:17:00.000 If you understand the point that I'm trying to make here.

00:17:02.000 Yeah, you're so committed to egalitarianism that you're not willing to take a better health care service than your fellow Canadian or something like that.

00:17:08.000 Well, it's just kind of like that, you know, demonstrably if we were asked to pay a little bit more.

00:17:14.000 If the people that had the means to pay a little bit more were in fact being asked to pay, that would be better for the whole system overall.

00:17:20.000 Because it would help the people.

00:17:21.000 Yeah, you'd remove those people from the wait list.

00:17:23.000 Well, it's kind of like, it's sort of like when you have private schools versus public schools, right?

00:17:29.000 Like it's often, the teachers unions often get exercise that the government gives any money at all to private schools.

00:17:34.000 But private schools actually help lessen the burden on the public system by taking those who have the ability to pay out of the public system and into the private system,

00:17:43.000 which then allows the public system to have more resources, you know, more funding per student per capita, all of these kinds of things.

00:17:50.000 The same logic could easily apply to the health care system.

00:17:52.000 But, you know, we've been told to believe that we have a right to pay nothing and that by paying nothing, we are somehow good moral people.

00:18:02.000 When I would argue that actually by paying something to people that have the means to pay a little bit could subsidize a system that would in fact be helping, you know, the less fortunate.

00:18:11.000 But instead, it's this kind of like complacent middle class comfort with paying nothing and thinking that they're being virtuous by paying nothing, even though that complacency is, I think, at the root of a lot of the sort of the financial sustainability problems.

00:18:25.000 Yeah. And then I've made this argument before, but then people become kind of like entitled to the welfare state, like they've been paying into it so much and they believe that they're owed it.

00:18:34.000 So even in the future, like you couldn't go and break up like the pensions or the health care because people feel like so entitled to it, even though, you know, it's never really it's not something that's concrete that should should be out of touch from the politicians.

00:18:48.000 So another one of your contentious viewpoints is to do with Quebec.

00:18:52.000 I'll kind of tie these two together because you have one sort of about the role of Quebec within confederation is really interesting.

00:18:58.000 But then also coupled with the idea that any federal politician must be perfectly fluent in both English and French, which really just excludes a lot of people in a lot of the country from ever being eligible to run federally, which kind of could turn away a lot of people.

00:19:14.000 So how did you come to these views and maybe you can kind of help re-articulate them?

00:19:18.000 Well, I mean, I guess when you grow up in British Columbia, you realize how preposterous bilingualism is like as long as I've ever been alive, I have understood bilingualism as this like weird symbolic thing that is of no practical significance to my lived experience or the lived experience of anyone else in this province.

00:19:39.000 Right. So like no one. I mean, I shouldn't say no one, because obviously there are some French speaking people as there's Italian speaking, you know, every sort of language Portuguese speaking, every language under the sun.

00:19:51.000 There are some people that will speak it in any province. But obviously this is by no stretch of any imagination, a bilingual province like there is not an equal community of French and English speakers to the point where it would make logical sense to put all of the signs and packages and boxes and whatnot in both French and English.

00:20:11.000 So to me, that always just kind of seemed somewhat ludicrous. And the idea that this is being done for ideological reasons by a distant government, you know, on the other side of the continent.

00:20:23.000 So that sort of instinctively has just always made me skeptical, like that this just seems very contrived and very artificial and like why this is being done is being done for some political reason for people that are very far away and it's being sort of artificially imposed here.

00:20:38.060 But the problem is like if it's just if bilingualism was just something that kind of seemed weird and annoying to me as a British Columbian and kind of pointless, that would be one thing.

00:20:48.020 But the problem is when this fantasy reaches the point where it's actively distorting our democracy, which is what I believe happens in the cases that you described.

00:20:56.280 When, for example, like right now we're talking about who's going to be the next leader of the Conservative Party someday and what is the first criteria that you always hear spoken about in the press when they're sizing up a candidate's fitness for that office?

00:21:08.880 It's like a fluently bilingual, right? Fluently bilingual, former cabinet minister, fluently bilingual, you know, former executive of this or that.

00:21:16.540 And to me, like that is not at all what I think we should be elevating as one of the first criteria when it comes to sizing up who should be prime minister of this country.

00:21:25.200 You know, but unfortunately, it is treated extraordinarily seriously.

00:21:30.360 And as a result, we are cleaving something like 80 percent of Canadians who are not fluent in both French and English.

00:21:36.280 Right now, the census had it out just the other day where it's like we're at an all time high and it's 17.9 percent of Canadians are fluent in French and English.

00:21:46.760 Only 9 percent of Canadians who speak English as their first language are fluent in French and English.

00:21:51.480 And those are disproportionately English Canadians who live in Quebec, right, which is to say Montreal, right?

00:21:57.300 So you're talking about like an extraordinarily tiny slice of the Canadian public that then because of this kind of like fantasy of bilingualism,

00:22:05.540 you're saying like only this tiny class of people can be prime minister, can be a senior cabinet minister, can be governor of the Bank of Canada,

00:22:12.520 can be chief justice of the Supreme Court, can be governor general, can be head of the armed forces.

00:22:16.820 You know, you go down the list. And in any other society where you had so much power concentrated in such a tiny sliver of the society,

00:22:24.760 we'd say this is not really a proper democracy.

00:22:28.240 Like this is some sort of deformed elitist society that is sort of set up in a way that privileges this certain elite.

00:22:36.800 And they are an elite. I mean, I'm sure that there's plenty of people in Montreal who are speaking English and French on a day to day basis

00:22:42.160 and don't think of themselves as being particularly elite. And that's fine. I'm sensitive to them.

00:22:46.300 But when you're talking about like a certain class of people that have sort of grown up in this like Montreal, Ottawa sort of axis,

00:22:54.300 you know, often they're from bilingual families, you know.

00:22:57.300 A good example is Prime Minister Trudeau.

00:23:00.260 You know, he literally grew up in a house, you know, as the son of a prime minister,

00:23:04.180 where like his father would speak, you know, English to him on one floor of the mansion

00:23:08.120 and French on another floor of the mansion.

00:23:10.200 Is that right?

00:23:10.780 Yeah. Like in order to like make him the perfectly bilingual, you know, specimen.

00:23:15.020 Right. And then with other families that have means, you know, they put their kids into French immersion at a very young age.

00:23:21.340 Or, you know, they go on like immersion trips to France or, you know, or they put them in, you know,

00:23:27.640 immersive schools of other sorts, universities and this sort of thing.

00:23:31.120 Like they put a lot of effort and means into like turning their kids into a perfectly bilingual person because of the ambition.

00:23:38.140 Right. But, you know, most Canadians, this is not remotely one of their first priorities in life.

00:23:42.680 To most Canadians, French is a distant, exotic and for all intents and purposes, foreign language that does not make any logical sense to learn.

00:23:50.080 And that's the other thing that we have to be very clear about is that learning another language is very difficult.

00:23:54.680 And time consuming.

00:23:55.560 And very time consuming.

00:23:56.380 And most, you know, linguists will tell you that your ability to retain and gain fluency in a language is largely dictated by perceived need and perceived need in the context of communication,

00:24:07.460 not perceived need in the context of like, well, I might want to be prime minister someday, therefore I should learn French.

00:24:13.120 It's like, no, do I need this language to communicate with people that are around me in a day to day fashion,

00:24:19.320 which is why Montrealers become fluently bilingual, because that is a bicultural bilingual society.

00:24:25.000 A person out here in British Columbia, they might want to learn how to speak fluent French for political reasons,

00:24:31.060 but it's going to be extraordinarily difficult for them to achieve the level of fluency that the political class, that the media,

00:24:37.420 and certainly that the Quebecers that we're all supposed to be so anxious about would consider sufficient,

00:24:42.380 because, you know, you do not gain pure fluency just by reading books or by watching movies.

00:24:47.920 You gain it by using it in a day to day basis.

00:24:49.860 So any political system that asks this very unrealistic requirement of its political class is not a society that I think is really a democracy worthy of the name.

00:25:02.340 Yeah. Well, just to back up your point.

00:25:03.940 So I also grew up in Vancouver and the first time I ever met a native French speaker was like when I went to France as a teenager.

00:25:11.300 Like I never, ever interacted with one.

00:25:13.340 And I think that a lot of students at my school, you kind of resent French because it's forced upon you.

00:25:17.560 And it is sort of very like, you know, the establishment says that you must speak French because we're this bilingual country.

00:25:23.660 But if you grow up in Vancouver, I mean, you're far more likely to interact with Mandarin speakers or, you know, any.

00:25:29.580 I don't even think that French would be ranked as like one of the top five, maybe even top 10 languages spoken by households in Vancouver.

00:25:37.360 And so it does seem like a little bit odd and foreign that, you know, even if you take a little bit in school, 0.58

00:25:43.400 you take a class or something that doesn't lead to the kind of fluency required to, say, be willing to get into federal politics.

00:25:50.280 And I think what you what you get is, you know, you end up even of the Conservative Party when it comes to leaders.

00:25:55.840 You know, you have you end up with leaders like Andrew Scheer, who was sort of on the outside is from the prairies and maybe a Westerner.

00:26:03.920 But, you know, if you if you read a little bit about Andrew Scheer, he grew up in Ottawa.

00:26:07.120 His parents were, I think, bureaucrats where his father worked for the Ottawa citizen and his mother was in the in the civil service.

00:26:13.180 So, you know, he is kind of like an insider establishment fellow that sort of ended up becoming a wearing the moniker of like peripopulism.

00:26:21.020 But really, he wasn't. He was part of this sort of Laurentian elite.

00:26:24.640 No, it's true. And I mean, and the other thing that's important to remember about politicians like Andrew Scheer is that they were elected to parliament when they were extraordinarily young.

00:26:31.520 Right. Like Andrew Scheer was in his early 20s when he was elected to parliament.

00:26:34.580 The same thing is true with like Jason Kenney, James Moore, like these sort of Westerners that are often held up as being like, oh, anyone can do it.

00:26:41.200 Right. But it's like when you're elected to parliament at that young of an age and when you're going to like, you know, start your career in Ottawa at that young of an age.

00:26:49.000 Again, like you're in a milieu in which you're getting a lot of reinforcement for your bilingualism.

00:26:54.920 Like if if Andrew Scheer wanted to practice his French and all the rest of it, he obviously had a lot of opportunities.

00:26:59.940 So did Jason Kenney. So for that matter, did did Stephen Harper, although the Harper explanation, from what I understand, Harper is is just kind of a bit of a natural polygot.

00:27:07.520 Like he's just interested in language for its own sake. And, you know, he can speak Spanish as well.

00:27:12.220 And this kind of thing I've heard. So. But anyway, the point is that this is it's just it's such an exceptional circumstance to be able to be speak fluent French,

00:27:21.660 certainly when you're from a non Montreal, Ottawa sort of part of the country.

00:27:26.640 And I think in the context of the conservative leadership election, we just have to really realize how much of a toll that is taking on the ability for this country to have leaders that have fresh ideas who have come from a walk of life other than young cabinet minister,

00:27:43.760 you know, who was elected to Ottawa at age 20 and has only ever thought about politics in the context of Parliament Hill.

00:27:49.480 And I think that that's really like I wrote a piece about this for The Washington Post the other day.

00:27:54.240 Like, I think that when we're talking about, like, why is the Conservative Party not better?

00:27:58.640 Why is Canada's ruling elite in general not better?

00:28:01.120 You have to look at structural explanations as much as just kind of like ideological theories in that.

00:28:06.340 And I focus a lot like if there's been one kind of consistent theme of a lot of the commentary that I've done over the years,

00:28:11.880 it's that I want to talk more about structural factors that explain things.

00:28:15.680 And it is frustrating to me that people don't talk about the structural role that bilingualism has played in limiting and, you know,

00:28:24.560 causing the degree of conformity of thought that we see in the Canadian political class.

00:28:29.240 And so I know that it's seen as a controversial thing to question.

00:28:33.040 Like you said, oh, I'm a controversial person.

00:28:35.660 But I just like to me, it shouldn't be controversial.

00:28:38.680 Like, it's just an objective reality that this is a system that we've imposed upon our democracy that is causing a lot of problems.

00:28:44.860 And we should be able to reexamine it.

00:28:46.620 And I welcome the debate.

00:28:47.960 Like, if there are people that can make a, like, aggressive case for bilingualism, why I'm wrong about this, I'm happy to hear it. 1.00

00:28:56.960 But what I often hear is just like, you shouldn't talk about that.

00:28:59.680 Like, this is a taboo.

00:29:01.100 Certainly, like, Canadians from another generation have, you know, like a lot of hangups about it.

00:29:06.400 Like, I guess they feel like that we've gone through this before and that bilingualism was kind of like the price of buying a certain sort of social piece after, I don't know, like the FLQ crisis or Lord knows what.

00:29:17.000 But, you know, like our generation, like being younger, I just think it's time to, like, reexamine some of these things.

00:29:22.660 And I'm perfectly willing to say, like, you know, when Pierre Elliott Trudeau passed the Official Languages Act, I'm sure his heart was in the right place.

00:29:29.180 It was a kind of solution to the perceived problems of his time.

00:29:32.880 But I'm sort of saying, you know, it's now literally been 50 years since that piece of legislation was passed.

00:29:37.920 It's time for an objective reexamination of it and sort of say, is it done what it set out to do, A, and B, what were the unintended consequences of it?

00:29:46.980 And I think the unintended consequences are quite ample.

00:29:49.540 Yeah, no, that's a really good point.

00:29:50.640 I think that you could say that it was aspirational.

00:29:53.040 Like, you know, we would all like to have a society where everyone spoke, you know, multiple languages and people in one part of the country could easily communicate with others.

00:30:01.080 But can you really just, like, impose that through a top-down edict that says, like, okay, we're all bilingual now.

00:30:06.560 You know, like you said 50 years later, it's not really the case because most people don't live that way.

00:30:10.200 Like, it doesn't actually change your day-to-day life just because, you know, some politician told you that you have to learn French.

00:30:15.520 As I said, I remember resenting French class because I just thought it was so annoying.

00:30:19.660 Like, I would way rather learn Spanish so that when I go to Mexico, I can talk to people or whatever, you know.

00:30:24.240 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:30:24.860 But I think it's like, I could see the other perspective, too, just in that, like, if you are from rural Quebec, you would want your prime minister to be able to communicate to you.

00:30:34.960 I would feel resentful if there was a prime minister that didn't really speak English.

00:30:38.800 Yeah.

00:30:39.040 And I would not feel, like, fully maybe represented, but that just shows what a strong, how strong language is in identity and in sort of, you know, making sure that you feel like a part of a community.

00:30:52.460 Can you communicate to each other in a single language?

00:30:55.840 And I think that when it comes to French, a lot of people in Western Canada wouldn't care.

00:30:59.440 They would be indifferent.

00:31:00.100 If there was a political leader, like, say, right now, there's a couple of prominent people that their name keeps getting thrown around to be the next leader.

00:31:07.900 Like, I'll say, Brad Wall or, you know, Kevin O'Leary before Brett Wilson, maybe, that would all be kind of, like, interesting leaders that would take the party in a new direction.

00:31:17.000 But none of them speak French, so they're just, like, out of the question.

00:31:19.280 And I think that a lot of people in Western Canada would be, like, who cares?

00:31:22.400 Just, you know, let's run and see what happens.

00:31:24.360 Exactly.

00:31:24.740 Whereas I worry that more people in Ontario would have the sensibility that they would want, and Eastern Canada as well, the sensibility that they would think it was unfair to people in Quebec to not have a French-speaking prime minister.

00:31:36.200 Yeah.

00:31:36.620 I guess this is, I've heard people say this about the way that Ontarians sort of think about politics, that, like, the idea of, like, will it play in Quebec is a consideration that Ontarians take.

00:31:49.280 Take seriously, or at least are purported to take seriously, that people in Western Canada just don't think of at all, right?

00:31:56.360 But, I mean, what I would argue as well, and this was a point I made in my column, is that there's not a lot of evidence to suggest that being bilingual makes much of a difference in terms of the eyes of Quebec, you know?

00:32:06.900 Stephen Harper was bilingual.

00:32:08.660 I mean, I know that to some Quebecers, it doesn't matter how bilingual you are, you're never bilingual enough.

00:32:15.120 But for the purposes of the argument, we'll just say Stephen Harper was fluently bilingual, Andrew Scheer was fluently bilingual.

00:32:22.460 A lot of good that did them in Quebec, right?

00:32:24.960 The Conservative Party in any sort of centre-right party in this country, be it the PC, Alliance Reform, or the Conservative Party of Canada, has not won more than a dozen seats in Quebec in 30 years.

00:32:35.980 You have to go all the way back to Brian Mulroney in 1988 under the Progressive Conservative Party to find a Conservative Party that did well in Quebec.

00:32:43.480 And that's despite, you know, like I said, a succession of fluently bilingual leaders.

00:32:49.040 And certainly, like, you could say the same thing about the NDP.

00:32:51.580 They've had nothing but bilingual leaders.

00:32:54.400 They did well in Quebec for a brief window of time, and that has now come to a close.

00:32:59.120 Well, when they were running someone from Quebec.

00:33:00.680 Well, that was also important, right?

00:33:03.060 So, like, this is the issue as well.

00:33:05.000 It's to what extent do Quebecers care about the language side versus to what degree do they just want a Quebecer on the ballot?

00:33:11.440 One of the biggest determinants of how Quebecers will vote is just whether or not that party leader happens to be from Quebec.

00:33:17.260 This is the case for the Liberal Party as well as the Conservatives or the NDP or anyone else, right?

00:33:22.180 Mulroney, not incidentally, who was the last Conservative leader to do well in Quebec, was also the last Conservative leader from Quebec.

00:33:28.680 So, you know, whereas somebody like, say, the fact that Justin Trudeau did so much better than, say, Michael Ignatieff, well, you know, Justin Trudeau is also identifies as a son of Quebec in the way that Ignatieff obviously wasn't, right?

00:33:40.840 Jack Layton was from Quebec in a way Jagmeet Singh obviously isn't, right?

00:33:45.220 Even Thomas Mulcair did better than Jagmeet Singh, who was also from Quebec.

00:33:48.460 So, yeah, I mean, these things are complicated, and I think that the idea that if you just speak French that that somehow is sufficient is just not really borne out by the evidence.

00:34:00.480 And that, the argument that I'm making now is just kind of an argument for the Conservative Party to sort of re-examine their own commitment to this principle.

00:34:08.940 The Liberals can commit to the principle all they want because I think they believe in it deeply, like, as a matter of ideological principle.

00:34:14.480 Like, they're committed to a Trudeopian view of the country 50 years later that we can make a bilingual country, and that I think to some degree they're just in denial, and they think the country is bilingual, and that's why they're spending all of this money now on, you know, supporting the French language minorities in British Columbia, you know, literally like building French schools in the Arctic because they think that, you know, that's their ideological understanding of the country that they govern.

00:34:40.100 It's obviously not the case in reality. But the Conservatives are much less in hock to that delusion.

00:34:45.400 I think that they sort of worship at this particular altar because they think it makes sense as a matter of political strategy, and I just think there's not a lot of evidence to suggest that that's the case.

00:34:54.760 So, how much of what the Conservatives put forth as their policy is them just bowing to this sort of politically correct, you know, structure set up by the Liberals, and how much is it things that they actually genuinely believe?

00:35:09.520 Because I think one of your other criticisms of the Conservative Party of Canada is that they're not really all that conservative.

00:35:15.820 When you look at some of the sort of main things that they put forth, they don't really differentiate themselves that much from the Liberals, like in terms of, you think of some of the major issues in the US, say that Republicans go after, like, you know, they're very pro-life.

00:35:28.560 The party, even someone like Donald Trump, who is sort of more of a New York liberal or whatever, you know, he was very adamantly anti-abortion, pro-life.

00:35:38.780 You know, when it comes to health care, they're not willing to have those conversations.

00:35:42.200 They're hardly willing to have conversations about, you know, taxes or big government, the big welfare state, the pensions and the health care that are unsustainable.

00:35:52.160 Like, you know, when it comes to sort of the major issues in our society, it seems like the Conservatives don't really take a very strong Conservative position.

00:36:00.740 So I kind of want to have your take on, you know, what should the Conservatives be doing to try to put forth more of a Conservative face?

00:36:09.360 Who should be leading this party?

00:36:10.780 What would you like to see as we transition here to a new leader?

00:36:13.740 Yeah, I mean, I think that all the things that you said are entirely correct.

00:36:17.560 Another issue that you didn't mention, but I know it's important to you, would be immigration as well.

00:36:21.860 Like, you don't see a lot of differentiation on the two parties there.

00:36:25.640 But one of the things that I think is quite unique and quite frustrating is that I do think, like, a lot of people within the Conservative Party,

00:36:31.980 certainly within, like, the high ranks of the party, not only the leaders, but, like, the people around them,

00:36:36.540 are very stereotypically Conservative, like, are likely to be, I think, pro-life, are likely to have, like, very strong views on immigration and the healthcare system.

00:36:47.060 And if you hang out with them in an intimate setting, they'll tell you those things very openly, right?

00:36:50.880 Like, and they all, you know, they watch Fox News, they cheer on Trump, you know, they read the National Review.

00:36:56.340 Like, they're very much part of a very clearly ideological sort of Conservative worldview that is not philosophically very different at all from the sort of Conservative worldview in the States.

00:37:06.540 They just are playing a very different political game that I think is often very condescending and patronizing

00:37:12.560 because it's based around the premise that, like, the Canadian people are, like, very fragile and very delicate

00:37:17.780 and cannot handle that kind of stiff medicine and therefore need to, like, be given this very sort of gentle, incrementalist,

00:37:25.720 super ultra-watered-down version of the truth, right?

00:37:30.960 And I find that really, I mean, it is patronizing, as I said, and it's kind of depressing because it's, like,

00:37:37.060 if you believe in those things as a matter of policy, if you're happy to cheer on, you know,

00:37:41.500 Trump appointing Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court or what have you,

00:37:45.280 but you're not willing to do the equivalent of that in this society,

00:37:48.240 well, then, you know, you're committing, like, a great offence to the Canadian people, right?

00:37:53.280 You're denying them your own wisdom as you believe it for the sake of political expediency,

00:37:58.980 which is to say for the sake of power for its own sake.

00:38:01.840 Like, that's a form of extreme moral cowardice, and I think it's really appalling.

00:38:07.760 And, I mean, I don't quite know how you sort of course-correct.

00:38:11.940 I mean, like, the thing with Andrew Scheer, I think, was very interesting about the whole issue with the social issues, right?

00:38:19.380 Sort of the conventional narrative is that's what brought him down, right?

00:38:22.960 But part of, I think, what brought him down was that this hidden agenda thing does have some validity to it, right?

00:38:30.640 Like, Andrew Scheer says he's personally pro-life.

00:38:33.180 If you are pro-life, then you believe that abortion is one of the great moral crimes of our time

00:38:37.800 and that it's something that a sort of a sane society should not practice to the extent we do.

00:38:42.860 Okay, if you believe that, then what does that say about you as a politician who's not willing to act on that deeply held moral conviction in your public capacity

00:38:51.140 as a man who, in theory, has the ability to change laws and so forth, right?

00:38:54.920 It either means that you're like a complete moral coward who's involved in politics for completely amoral reasons

00:39:00.060 or that you maybe do have a hidden agenda that people are rightly, should be, you know, people on the left or what have you, 0.88

00:39:06.320 are right to be suspicious of because it just does not make sense that you could believe that and not act upon it

00:39:12.460 unless you're just this completely cynical creature, right?

00:39:15.440 And so I do think that conservatives need to figure out a way that they can be true to their convictions in a more honest and open way

00:39:21.820 and actually talk about what it is that they believe, articulate what it means to be a conservative,

00:39:26.700 sort of why they believe these things and why their vision of the country and of politics and of morality and ethics

00:39:33.740 and whatever else you want to get into actually meaningfully differs from what the parties of the left believe and are pushing.

00:39:40.260 You know, tell us how, I mean, it sounds very simple to say, but it's like,

00:39:43.800 tell us why your ideas are better and are going to make the country better, which is different than saying policy, right?

00:39:50.660 Policy is a very nuanced and specific thing.

00:39:53.580 And, you know, the parties can make these big volumes of, you know, their manifestos for the election.

00:39:58.620 It's full of all these specific policy things.

00:40:00.480 That's fine.

00:40:01.240 But what I do think what Donald Trump showed is that a lot of people just want to have a sense of like,

00:40:06.360 what are your base instincts?

00:40:08.580 What is kind of like the sort of your sense of right and wrong that animates you on a day-to-day basis?

00:40:13.680 And how is that mindset going to change Ottawa and thus change the country?

00:40:19.020 And I don't think that that's something the conservatives have been at all good at doing.

00:40:22.900 Frankly, I don't think that was something that Harper was good at doing. 1.00

00:40:25.060 And I don't think that was something that Scheer was good at doing.

00:40:27.080 And instead, it sort of comes off that the voters are kind of being tricked, right?

00:40:31.320 Like that the conservatives leaders are treating the public in a condescending way

00:40:35.900 in order to kind of fool them into voting for a certain clique of smart people

00:40:41.160 who are going to come and do their own thing.

00:40:42.880 And I think that that, unfortunately, is how a lot of sort of conservative backroom people

00:40:46.220 view politics and view the great game of politics.

00:40:49.220 It's like, let's trick the Canadian public just enough to get in power.

00:40:53.180 And then, you know, because we're all good people, then we'll run the country as it should be run.

00:40:56.920 But we can't sort of campaign on that openly because the public is too skittish to do it.

00:41:00.860 It becomes a completely, you know, circular reinforcing sort of cycle.

00:41:04.980 Yeah.

00:41:05.140 And I think a lot of people, like I personally thought that Stephen Harper was a great prime minister.

00:41:08.200 And I think he should go down as one of the better prime ministers just in terms of his policy,

00:41:12.080 in terms of his sort of commitment to something like support of Israel or just, you know,

00:41:17.180 the way that he handled crisis.

00:41:18.960 Like I didn't agree with the auto bailout in 2008, but, you know, faced with such an extraordinary

00:41:24.620 circumstance, I think that he managed the sort of recession spending in a manageable way

00:41:29.960 that he didn't grow the bureaucracy.

00:41:30.940 I think that there's a couple of things that Harper did that really are solid from a sort

00:41:36.140 of fiscal conservative perspective.

00:41:38.200 However, the kind of incrementalism, like Harper had the opportunity, for instance,

00:41:43.280 to defund the CBC or at least change the model completely, put it something more in line

00:41:48.460 with what NPR is like in the United States, instead of having this huge left-wing ideological

00:41:52.640 machine dictating our media landscape and eating up more and more, you know, but he failed

00:41:57.520 to do that.

00:41:58.040 He failed to appoint conservative judges.

00:41:59.600 He failed to really push the country in any meaningfully conservative way, which, you

00:42:04.580 know, you could argue maybe that's not the role of the prime minister.

00:42:06.640 Maybe that's more of a civil society thing where, you know, academics and media figures

00:42:11.240 and, you know, cultural groups, think tanks, that kind of thing, it's their job to move

00:42:16.060 and then politicians just kind of follow.

00:42:17.840 But I think a lot of conservatives now view the incrementalism as a mistake that, you know,

00:42:22.900 you need to be conservative and you need to be bold about it.

00:42:25.460 But again, you know, the lessons, the so-called lessons after the last election were

00:42:29.460 just what you're saying, that Scheer was too conservative and that's why he lost.

00:42:33.600 But I really didn't see him articulating a very strong conservative message.

00:42:38.380 So for the next leader, do you think that sort of if the person, say, is Catholic or

00:42:43.460 the person is pro-life, do you think it would be better for them to just sort of openly state

00:42:48.260 that and say, you know, we as a conservative party want legislation on this issue, we want

00:42:53.420 to reopen this debate?

00:42:54.500 Or do you think that would just, like, bring the conservative party back or end up in a

00:42:59.260 situation where the parties are split or, you know, something even worse could happen if

00:43:03.400 you did, you know, finally have a politician that had the courage to just say, you know,

00:43:07.060 I think about half the people in the party are pro-life and so we're going to be a pro-life

00:43:10.140 party.

00:43:11.180 You know, what would happen to the other half of the people in the party?

00:43:13.760 Like, I think that there is a consensus among people in the conservative party movement that

00:43:18.860 they just really don't want to talk about those issues because they know that they lose

00:43:22.360 elections.

00:43:23.540 So how can you be kind of honest and upfront with the Canadian people about what your

00:43:27.660 political views are if you hold views that may be offside with the Canadian public?

00:43:32.560 Or to go back to what you're talking about earlier about how there's sort of this scare

00:43:35.640 tactic about health care that you believe that if you have any kind of private health

00:43:40.600 care initiatives, it's because you're, like, awful and anti-Canadian and you don't care

00:43:45.460 about common people and you want people to die on the street and all this kind of stuff.

00:43:48.400 Like, you know, all of these kind of narratives that get played out by the mainstream media

00:43:51.820 really just denigrating conservatism.

00:43:54.540 How do you overcome those things?

00:43:56.440 You know, do you see someone in the party that might be the person who could hold the

00:44:00.520 mantle or do you think it needs to be someone from the outside to fix all this?

00:44:03.320 Well, I mean, maybe I'm naive because I think that the Canadian public is capable of, you

00:44:13.120 know, accepting a higher grade of political conversation than we've had to date, right?

00:44:19.060 I don't think that we need to forever exist in this sort of universe in which the conventional

00:44:25.020 wisdom of the present is the conventional wisdom that we must always sort of be smothered

00:44:29.920 by.

00:44:30.160 I think that if you had a conservative, and again, like, maybe I'm naive about this, but

00:44:34.340 I feel like if you had a conservative who just sort of, like, came to the Canadian public

00:44:37.620 and said, look, this is the reality of the health care system and I'm, like, going to

00:44:42.140 argue it in clear, articulate terms, you know, talk about, like, how, you know, the current

00:44:46.440 funding model is unsustainable.

00:44:48.720 You know, we're going to ask the people that have more to pay a bit more, that will subsidize

00:44:52.300 the system, that will allow the less fortunate to have a higher quality of care.

00:44:55.620 Or if, you know, if we're talking about abortion, if he just says, like, look, this is the state

00:44:59.400 of Canada's abortion laws.

00:45:00.620 We have no regulation whatsoever.

00:45:02.620 This makes us a radical outlier in the context of the whole world.

00:45:05.960 We can at least bring our regime up to the standards that, say, Sweden has.

00:45:10.140 That's not asking a lot.

00:45:11.880 You know, just sort of framing these things in just kind of like a clear fact-based argument

00:45:16.900 and putting the parties of the left a little bit on the defensive, too.

00:45:21.060 Like, sort of saying, are you saying that, you know, no one should ever pay anything into

00:45:26.200 the Canadian health care system?

00:45:27.620 Are you saying that any abortion in any context all of the time is great and there should be 0.94

00:45:31.700 no health and safety or, you know, viability sort of restraints at all?

00:45:37.740 Like, put people on the defensive a little bit about some of these issues.

00:45:40.500 And, I mean, to me, that's having a legitimate argument of ideas.

00:45:44.400 And, again, like, you know, maybe the Conservatives would win or lose based on this.

00:45:49.440 I would think that these arguments appeal to a certain sense of common sense and decency

00:45:53.380 that I think most Canadians have.

00:45:55.300 I think that when you poll Canadians about a lot of these questions, they do express opinions

00:45:59.440 that are kind of more conservative than conventional wisdom dictates Canadians to have.

00:46:04.880 So, I mean, I'm willing to try.

00:46:06.620 I mean, I guess all you can sort of say is that we've tried the alternative.

00:46:09.660 It doesn't seem to be working all that well because, you know, as I said before,

00:46:13.920 the public gets suspicious.

00:46:17.080 They start to think, like, that it's not natural for the Conservatives to claim that

00:46:20.780 they have no problem with any of these status quo things.

00:46:24.120 It does not make sense that people would self-identify as being members of a different political party

00:46:29.840 that have views that are exactly the same as the party of the left, right?

00:46:34.280 Like, that just doesn't pass the smell test.

00:46:36.320 And so, as a result, that's why it's very easy to push narratives that foster or that

00:46:40.900 encourage suspicion of the Conservatives as being, you know, devious or underhanded and

00:46:45.200 that kind of thing.

00:46:45.960 I think for a Conservative leader to come forward and say, yes, I do think differently on these

00:46:50.400 issues and I'm going to be willing to articulate why I think differently.

00:46:53.940 And I'm going to also call out the left-wing parties for, you know, putting them on the

00:47:01.440 spot and forcing them to justify why their support of a rather radical status quo is in

00:47:06.340 fact okay.

00:47:07.020 You know, I would make this argument, of course, about bilingualism as well.

00:47:09.820 I think you can make these arguments about immigration as well.

00:47:12.140 But I think that there's also a lot of issues that the Conservatives could just bring fresh

00:47:17.320 to the table.

00:47:17.960 You know, I don't think that all political debates have to occur within the framework of

00:47:23.660 what the left wants to hurt the Conservatives by raising suspicions on.

00:47:30.200 You know, the Conservatives should feel a little bit more empowered to bring forward some issues

00:47:33.800 of their own and wage the offensive rather than always the defensive.

00:47:37.520 And offensive as it relates to issues that relate to, you know, sort of experiences that

00:47:43.180 affect day-to-day Canadian society.

00:47:44.760 It doesn't have to just always be partisan offensiveness, right?

00:47:48.380 And I think this was part of the problem with Andrew Scheer, is that it can't just always

00:47:51.560 be, like, the offensive issues can't just always be the Liberal Party is bad and corrupt 1.00

00:47:56.420 and, you know, Justin Trudeau's a big dumb idiot or whatever, right? 1.00

00:47:59.660 Like, you have to actually be able to, like, raise issues. 1.00

00:48:01.660 Like, say, for example, here in Vancouver, drug abuse and homelessness is a huge problem in

00:48:06.460 our society.

00:48:07.040 I think most people are very aware of that.

00:48:08.940 There are lots of drug-addicted people.

00:48:10.900 There are lots of homeless people.

00:48:12.280 It causes blight on the city.

00:48:13.720 It's an embarrassment in the eyes of, you know, the large tourist community we have

00:48:17.800 here.

00:48:18.180 Like, it's a problem.

00:48:19.280 Well, and also just for those individuals.

00:48:21.460 Like, it's not a decent life.

00:48:22.940 Like, we live in an advanced Western rich country and yet we have people who are just living 1.00

00:48:27.180 in absolute filth and it can't be a good life for them.

00:48:30.660 I mean, they deserve human dignity as well.

00:48:33.120 And so we should acknowledge that dignity by trying to do what we can to lift them out of

00:48:37.520 that.

00:48:37.800 Sorry to interrupt you.

00:48:38.420 No, no, you make the exact very important point, right?

00:48:41.880 Like, this is fundamentally a problem of quality of life for these people.

00:48:47.060 It is inexcusable that we have, you know, scenes like Hastings and Maine in this.

00:48:52.880 I mean, it's truly appalling.

00:48:54.680 But, you know, you don't hear the Conservatives talk about this.

00:48:57.680 They don't wage the offensive.

00:48:59.720 They don't say, like, Canada has a huge significant homelessness problem, a huge significant drug

00:49:04.900 addiction problem, that people are living these terrible lives and then dying in this

00:49:08.700 tragic and grotesque way.

00:49:10.840 And why are they not saying this?

00:49:12.020 I don't know.

00:49:12.900 I mean, why do we have an unambitious political conversation about these kinds of social issues?

00:49:18.140 And they are social issues.

00:49:19.320 Like, social issues is not just abortion and LGBT rights.

00:49:22.780 Like, this is a social issue.

00:49:24.460 So I don't know why the Conservatives are not a little bit more aggressive.

00:49:27.260 But I do think that, like, a conservatism that moves forward will have to identify a

00:49:32.460 few big issues that are impacting Canadian society and saying that, like, we are going

00:49:37.380 to make these issues our causes, you know, because this is the thing with the left.

00:49:42.900 So the Liberal Party has a lot of causes.

00:49:45.280 They have climate change.

00:49:46.300 They have LGBT rights.

00:49:47.500 They have reconciliation with the Indigenous peoples.

00:49:50.220 You know, they have a number of issues that they're willing to be aggressive on and

00:49:53.880 assertive on and say, these are our priorities.

00:49:56.320 The Conservatives traditionally have had basically one, which is, like, tax cuts.

00:50:00.200 And that's about it, right?

00:50:01.020 Or balancing the budget.

00:50:02.000 Balancing the budget.

00:50:02.840 Which they don't even really do when they're in office.

00:50:04.480 Yeah, exactly.

00:50:04.900 Because, of course, balancing the budget requires making cuts.

00:50:06.980 And, of course, that's something that we can never do because people might be offended

00:50:09.420 by that, right?

00:50:10.440 So going forward, it's not good enough to just say, well, and I guess the other thing

00:50:14.860 that Conservatives are really into is the pipelines, right?

00:50:17.780 Like, I think that...

00:50:19.560 I don't remember that conversation 10 years ago.

00:50:21.840 That's, like, a, you know, a pretty recent thing.

00:50:24.180 That is true, right?

00:50:25.580 But I do think that there is a problem of a Conservative Party that would just be pipelines

00:50:30.520 and tax cuts.

00:50:31.420 Like, I think that that's not sufficient to win an election.

00:50:34.300 I think that's maybe sufficient to do what we saw in the last election and win, like,

00:50:38.020 80% of the vote in rural Alberta.

00:50:40.140 But, you know, as much as I love Alberta, you do need to be able to expand more.

00:50:43.660 And that requires having issues and having conversations and having causes that you're

00:50:49.620 willing to fight for and be passionate about that seem relevant to the lived experiences

00:50:53.620 of Canadians and issues that are kind of going ignored in the blind spot of the parties of

00:50:58.220 the left who, you know, are preoccupied with their own pet concerns at the expense of many

00:51:02.140 other completely valid issues, too.

00:51:04.260 Yeah, so I would just add to that in saying that there's this sort of, like, perceived

00:51:09.960 wisdom that the Canadian public is just, like, left wing, like the average disposition of

00:51:14.520 a Canadian is left of centre or left of our American cousins or whatever.

00:51:18.380 And I would kind of challenge that.

00:51:19.760 I think that Canadians are pretty culturally conservative.

00:51:21.960 If you frame conservatism as thinking, like, you know, the family is the primary institution

00:51:28.840 in our society, whereas I would say that liberals fundamentally believe that, like, the government

00:51:33.240 is, like, the primary thing.

00:51:35.320 I mean, this is, like, a famous Barack Obama.

00:51:37.920 He opened, I think, the convention in 2012 saying that government is the only thing that

00:51:43.220 we all belong to and everyone cheered.

00:51:44.920 And to, like, a conservative, that kind of makes your skin crawl.

00:51:47.820 Like, we don't belong to the government.

00:51:49.620 Like, the government belongs to us.

00:51:51.380 But, you know, fundamentally, I think that the Canadians don't see themselves as, like,

00:51:55.540 a government-centric society.

00:51:56.840 And I think that you can appeal to Canadians on kind of cultural issues that are not so

00:52:01.920 in-your-face conservative.

00:52:03.440 Like, there would be things that the Canadian, you know, typical Canadian might agree with,

00:52:08.180 but they still wouldn't really define themselves as being conservative.

00:52:11.140 And I feel like the safe issues are the fiscal ones.

00:52:14.640 But then, you know, the social ones, like we're talking about with, you know, poverty or

00:52:19.960 homelessness.

00:52:20.380 But also, you know, the idea that, like, families are the best kind of, like, way to solve social

00:52:26.960 issues.

00:52:27.340 Like, if you know someone who's hard done by, you're better off helping them directly than,

00:52:32.060 like, waiting for the welfare state to come along and save them.

00:52:35.380 And that when you have welfare that's, like, providing this function, it discourages people

00:52:39.960 from actually wanting to help and donate through their communities, through their churches,

00:52:43.120 through their families.

00:52:43.800 And that's kind of problematic.

00:52:45.320 So I feel like conservatives need to figure out a way to capture that and sell it to the

00:52:50.980 Canadian public.

00:52:52.200 But I don't think that the media is any ally.

00:52:54.080 I think that they need to, like, go around the media because the media is just not interested

00:52:57.300 in helping to, like, promote a positive conservative vision.

00:53:02.620 So do you have any hope for the next conservative leader?

00:53:05.360 Do you, you know, you're not really saying who you support or anything like that?

00:53:08.980 Well, I mean, one thing that I was thinking about when you said that is that I do think

00:53:13.700 a lot of it comes to the conservative leader's ability to articulate conservatism as a kind

00:53:19.800 of disposition, right?

00:53:21.320 And again, like, I think that that's something that Trump was very successful at doing, right?

00:53:25.640 You had a sense of his basic disposition towards problems, what he saw as problems, you know,

00:53:31.940 what, not even necessarily, like, how he was going to fix them, but just, like, the willingness

00:53:36.240 to sort of say, this is bad, that is bad, in his sort of blunt way.

00:53:40.400 And so you kind of, like, trust his judgment, right?

00:53:42.620 I mean, obviously, people have all sorts of problems with him, and there's lots of valid 0.78

00:53:45.320 criticisms to make, but he offered himself up as basically, like, a leader, right?

00:53:49.920 A leader with instincts, and that people trusted those instincts and considered them superior

00:53:54.540 to the instincts of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, for that matter.

00:53:59.200 And I think that that is...

00:54:00.560 Or other conservatives, right?

00:54:01.300 Yeah, or other conservatives, right?

00:54:02.880 Better than Deb Bush or Marco Rubio.

00:54:04.420 Exactly, right?

00:54:05.260 And so I do think that that is something...

00:54:07.620 And the reason why I bring this up is because what you were saying before, like, when it comes

00:54:10.840 to sort of, like, well, what is the conservative kind of just sort of, like, base disposition

00:54:15.320 when it comes to things like, you know, family, the role of government, and sort of how we should

00:54:20.860 react to certain social issues and social ills as they manifest.

00:54:24.280 I think that you want to have...

00:54:26.540 Because I agree with what you were saying before, but, like, how a lot of Canadians are

00:54:29.720 much less liberal, I think, when it comes to these kind of dispositional things.

00:54:33.620 You can talk to even, like, somebody who votes NDP.

00:54:36.000 Like, say some, like, middle-aged guy who votes NDP who lives here.

00:54:40.180 You talk to him about a lot of issues that get beyond sort of partisan politics, and you'll

00:54:44.280 realize that he has basically sort of conservative dispositions in terms of he would say something

00:54:48.700 like, oh, you know, like, there's too many people on drugs, or, you know, like, the homelessness

00:54:51.920 problem is a real disgrace, or that people are too politically correct these days, people

00:54:56.600 are too hypersensitive.

00:54:57.840 Like, you know, like, there's a lot of these kinds of things where it's just kind of like,

00:55:01.880 how do you basically see the world?

00:55:03.380 How do you basically react?

00:55:04.680 And I think that you have to have a conservative who can be seen as an ally in that kind of

00:55:10.820 stuff.

00:55:11.180 Like, you can say, that guy thinks like I think.

00:55:13.220 He says the kind of things that I say.

00:55:15.260 He sees the problems in the same way that I do.

00:55:17.700 He doesn't seem like some ultra-polished politician who's just trying to, like, trick me with this

00:55:22.440 carefully, you know, tailored policy platform, you know, tax credits and, you know, very vague,

00:55:29.680 euphemistic language and this kind of stuff.

00:55:31.580 And I don't know, like, who that would be.

00:55:33.580 I certainly don't think most of these sort of cabinet ministers who are sort of being held

00:55:37.420 up are the right sort of person as far as that goes.

00:55:41.820 Because I think that they've just been, there's like, you know, somebody like Rona Ambrose,

00:55:45.900 Erin O'Toole, you know, these, you know, Michael Chong, Peter McKay.

00:55:49.720 Like, these people are all products of the system, right?

00:55:52.220 Like, they all studied under Stephen Harper.

00:55:54.960 They all studied under Andrew Scheer.

00:55:56.880 They understand one very specific way to practice politics because it's literally all they've

00:56:02.060 known.

00:56:02.540 Like, they don't have political careers that extend beyond that, right?

00:56:06.180 They play the Ottawa game one.

00:56:07.660 They're like the conservative establishment, like capital C, capital E.

00:56:10.640 Yeah, absolutely.

00:56:10.760 They're just the insiders.

00:56:11.680 And, you know, like, their background is that they've been cabinet ministers.

00:56:15.540 They've been people that are used to playing defense under the Harper years, playing defense

00:56:20.600 for policy, playing the incrementalist game, selling the public, like, engaging in marketing.

00:56:27.320 And, like, that has sort of been a big part of their political orientation, right?

00:56:31.240 They're not used to being leaders.

00:56:32.740 And they're not used to really thinking critically about their own party in the way that I think

00:56:39.060 would be necessary.

00:56:39.940 The one who I do think is a little bit of an exception to this is Pierre Polyevre, just

00:56:44.400 because I think that he has a kind of aggressiveness about him and a kind of bluntness that is quite

00:56:50.580 at odds with the way that a lot of the other sort of colleagues speak and act.

00:56:55.840 Pierre Polyevre is a controversial guy.

00:56:57.600 A lot of people do not like him for those same qualities and find his personality, like,

00:57:02.120 quite obnoxious and, you know.

00:57:04.060 Aggressive, yeah.

00:57:04.640 Yeah, and then, like, there's personal stuff as well, like, what is he like to work with

00:57:08.560 and this kind of stuff that you hear from Ottawa people.

00:57:10.800 But I do think that he has a bit more, he's closer to that than I think certainly any of

00:57:15.580 the other people do.

00:57:16.440 Does that mean that he'd be the best leader?

00:57:17.940 I don't know.

00:57:19.060 I mean, we'll have to see who else gets involved in the campaign as well.

00:57:22.780 But I do think, you know, at the end of the day, the leader of the Conservative Party

00:57:26.840 is going to be decided by Conservatives, right?

00:57:29.300 It's not going to be decided by the media.

00:57:30.920 It's not going to be decided by the left-wing opposition parties.

00:57:33.360 It's going to be decided by rank-and-file Conservative men and women party members.

00:57:37.940 That's not a big enough electorate, in my opinion.

00:57:40.400 I would much rather we had a system like the U.S. where you have an open primary and let,

00:57:44.060 you know, just ordinary voters vote.

00:57:45.520 But I do think that this is something that has to be considered seriously when we're evaluating

00:57:51.820 the likelihood of these different people to emerge as leaders, you know.

00:57:55.040 If it was up to the media, yeah, I'm sure they'd install Peter McKay as leader tomorrow

00:57:59.100 and he'd be marching in the Pride Parade the day after, right?

00:58:01.680 But the fact is, is that it's going to be up to Conservatives.

00:58:04.160 And I think a lot of Conservatives are going to have a sense of judgment about what they

00:58:08.460 want out of a leader that is more similar to the kind of thing that I think that you

00:58:12.060 and I have been articulating, where they'll have a sense that, like, the current track

00:58:16.220 is not working.

00:58:17.540 And just putting in a kind of another safe, media-friendly, centrist type who tries to

00:58:24.020 be so studiously uncontroversial is not going to be good enough.

00:58:27.700 I mean, I think it's possible that Rona Ambrose's sort of celebrity and her strong Alberta bona 0.79

00:58:33.240 fides might be enough to sort of sell the Canadian or the Conservative membership on someone who

00:58:39.700 I think is basically, you know, very continuous with the sort of sheer approach.

00:58:44.620 But I could also see somebody like Polly Ever, who is more aggressive and more confrontational 0.88

00:58:48.960 and presents as quite a different sort of leader than Scheer or even Harper, could do

00:58:55.300 much better than I think a lot of people in the press are suspecting, who are just so big

00:58:59.660 into their own kind of narrative about what went wrong with Scheer, that they're assuming

00:59:03.660 that the Conservative Party will surely vote as I would vote, and they've certainly reached

00:59:07.640 the same conclusion I will, and that therefore the party will make a sort of swift shift to

00:59:11.700 the left. And I just don't think that, I think that that's a somewhat overstated case.

00:59:16.200 And I could be, I would not be surprised if the party goes in quite a different direction.

00:59:19.580 I hope you're right, because I feel like a lot of people, especially the people who talk

00:59:24.320 in the media, say like, oh, the reason to your loss is because he has these social issues,

00:59:28.040 so all we need is an even more polished Conservative that doesn't have that baggage.

00:59:32.360 And so they look at Rona Ambrose like, hey, all we need is a Conservative who will be

00:59:36.240 like comfortable with the CBC and like written positively about in the Toronto Star, like

00:59:40.520 as if that's like the winning formula. And it's like, well, if you're going to have that

00:59:44.000 as a leader, you might as well just have like three Liberal parties or two Liberal parties,

00:59:47.340 because that's, and I agree that even though Pierre Paulevere is from the sort of Harper

00:59:52.320 era, he seems different and willing to be his own. I mean, just from very like preliminary

00:59:57.500 looking at it, I feel like the True North audience that I've seen, they've sort of been

01:00:01.580 vocally excited about the possibility of Pierre running. So I feel like he has a little bit

01:00:07.320 of momentum behind him. And maybe it is because he's a little bit more willing to, for instance,

01:00:11.780 push back against the media or say it as it is. Well, JJ, thank you so much. It's been a really

01:00:17.240 thought provoking conversation and really great to have you. Thank you so much for joining us

01:00:22.880 this afternoon. Thanks for having me.

Juno News - January 05, 2020

＂What's the future of conservatism in Canada？＂ Candice Malcolm sits down with JJ McCullough

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