JJ McCullough is a columnist with the Washington Post and a prominent YouTuber with very interesting, amusing political commentary. He used to write longer articles over at the National Review, but he s not doing that anymore. So we re in Vancouver and I thought it would be a great opportunity to grab JJ and talk about some of his more controversial views and the direction of the Conservative Party and conservatism more broadly in Canada.
00:00:24.000So we're in Vancouver and I thought it would be a great opportunity to grab JJ
00:00:27.000and talk a little bit about some of his more controversial views and the direction of the Conservative Party and conservatism more broadly in Canada.
00:00:35.000So first JJ, thanks for sitting down with me here.
00:01:22.000You 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.
00:01:30.000I don't think of myself as like an Ezra Levent type who like wants to be controversial and feeds off of controversy.
00:01:36.000I just think of myself as someone who likes being honest, who likes telling the truth as I understand it.
00:01:42.000You know, when I make my YouTube videos, I'm sharing facts about the world.
00:01:46.000I do sort of light political analysis.
00:01:49.000But 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.
00:01:57.000I'm performing a different sort of function.
00:02:01.000And 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.
00:02:10.000And I guess a lot of people are happy to leave it.
00:02:12.000Well, I think that's the case with almost everyone.
00:02:15.000That'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.
00:02:21.000I love following your Twitter feed because I feel like you just come out and say it.
00:02:26.000Sometimes I'll be kind of thinking about something, you know, for a column and JJ is like right out saying things like they are.
00:02:33.000So let's go through some of your sort of more controversial positions that a lot of them I don't find controversial myself,
00:02:39.000but maybe that's because I'm not part of the Laurentian elite.
00:02:42.000So 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,
00:02:51.000that the strain of anti-Americanism that runs on both sides of the political spectrum in Canada, both in the liberal and conservative side.
00:02:57.000And you just sort of didn't see it that way.
00:03:00.000So can you walk us through your views on that?
00:03:03.000Well, I think it is the most toxic force in Canadian culture, even more than just Canadian politics.
00:03:09.000I think, you know, that this country in many respects has anti-Americanism in its deepest core.
00:03:16.000Like it is very difficult and I'm sensitive to this.
00:03:19.000It 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.
00:03:27.000that always is supposed to let Canada coming off looking better and America looking worse.
00:03:32.000And I feel like so much of that is just based around, you know, falsehood, exaggeration, stereotype, dishonesty.
00:03:43.000It's all based around sort of presenting America as this like evil, sinister, deeply dysfunctional, ignorant, you know, hate filled.
00:03:52.000Just it's like it's cartoonish and it's just so obviously false.
00:03:55.000And I've always ever since I was young, I've always had a sense that it's false and that it's cartoonishly false.
00:04:00.000And it's animated by a kind of insecure that insecurity that Canadians have.
00:04:04.000And so I've always just liked pushing back against it.
00:04:07.000I 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.
00:04:14.000And I like forcing people to sort of confront their own ludicrous beliefs.
00:04:19.000And I do think that anti-Americanism is quite ludicrous.
00:04:22.000You 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.
00:04:28.000And America's never done anything good.
00:04:30.000And Canada's like, you know, the real moral superpower of the world.
00:04:33.000And it's like there's so many arguments like America's obviously a really great society.
00:04:37.000America has done so much good for the world, whether it's, you know, technology, medicine, entertainment, you know, you name it.
00:04:43.000You know, not even getting into like America's good role in global affairs, global diplomacy, all of these sorts of things.
00:04:50.000So I don't know. I just I find it just an endless source of exhaustion how anti-American Canadians are.
00:04:56.000And 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.
00:05:04.000And I think that the fact that Canadians cannot appreciate what a virtue that is, is really it's it's it's sad.
00:05:12.000I 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.
00:05:20.000And going down to the States was just like, I mean, you know, things are slightly different.
00:05:24.000You know, they have different candies and different whatever names for certain things.
00:05:27.000It was always amusing to see, like, what do Canadians say?
00:05:30.000What do Americans say that are different?
00:05:31.000But fundamentally, it's very, very similar society, culture, all the things.
00:05:35.000Obviously, we have different histories.
00:05:37.000And 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.
00:05:47.000I was reading back like a biography of Lawrence of Arabia after the First World War.
00:05:52.000There was like a division between what's now today Iraq and Syria.
00:05:56.000And they they just wanted the French and the English out.
00:06:00.000And 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.
00:06:12.000And they saw America as a sort of like non-colonialist power that was neutral and good and a force for good in the world.
00:06:18.000And 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.
00:06:31.000It's like this very ignorant way of looking at it.
00:06:34.000And then also, like, I see the same thing where people are like, oh, Americans are dumb.
00:06:38.000It's like, well, they also have the world's greatest institutions.
00:06:41.000Like, do you think the people who graduate from Harvard and Yale are dumb?
00:06:44.000Like, you know, like there's just such a straw man kind of argument.
00:06:48.000Yeah. 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?
00:07:04.000Yeah, like you can go through the line. Right.
00:07:06.000And, you know, and these these people, I think, are successful in part because they learn to turn off that part of their brain. Right.
00:07:14.000They 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.
00:07:24.000They understand America as the place where the good things are.
00:07:27.000And, you know, they're chasing their personal ambition and they, you know, sort of are willing to engage with that kind of stuff.
00:07:33.000It'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.
00:07:45.000Like, 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.
00:07:52.000And like just and I think that we as Canadians all have an obligation.
00:07:56.000Well, 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.
00:08:05.000Right. Like you pick on someone that often doesn't have the capacity to defend themselves in that context.
00:08:10.000Obviously, America can defend itself. But in that context, Canada, in the context of Canadian culture, Canadian society, America has very few advocates.
00:08:18.000I think in the political world, in the journalistic world, in sort of the broader sort of cultural space.
00:08:23.000And 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.
00:08:32.000Yeah, no, and it's great. I think it's much needed.
00:08:34.000You know, even if I didn't agree with you on that, just someone to push back against.
00:08:38.000You 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.
00:08:43.000That would be my criticism of like all of the Canadian mainstream media.
00:08:47.000Like, like imagine having a panel where they actually had like a pro-Trump voice.
00:08:51.000I 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.
00:08:56.000It's not just that he's enforcing them because he's an evil person.
00:08:59.000He 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.
00:09:08.000I 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.
00:09:18.000Public 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.
00:09:33.000So, again, it's like another issue that's like a third rail, like you're just not really allowed to.
00:09:38.000Yeah, and you're not allowed to talk about it because of the American issue. Right.
00:09:42.000So 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.
00:09:50.000Like it's not considered up there with Europe. Like I think we'd like to imagine ourselves.
00:09:55.000Or 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.
00:10:00.000But I think there was an OECD ranking that had the United States, I think I think it was out of 19 countries.
00:10:05.000The United States was ranked 19 and Canada was ranked 18.
00:10:08.000Yes, yes, yes. No, that's a very it's a very important point. Right.
00:10:11.000And 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,
00:10:18.000it's not really a conversation about health care. It's a conversation about anti-Americanism.
00:10:23.000It's a conversation about superiority and and how much better we feel, you know, because it's it's sort of.
00:10:29.000Canadian health care is analyzed in the context of a sample size of two, Canada and America.
00:10:35.000And the American case study is not even a real case study.
00:10:39.000It'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.
00:10:49.000I mean, they were telling you to get health insurance when you go to the US travelers insurance, which is a good thing.
00:10:55.000But, 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.
00:11:02.000And like like these kinds of things like that's the cliche that you're sort of forced to engage with.
00:11:07.000And 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?
00:11:15.000And 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.
00:11:24.000Right. 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.
00:11:35.000And 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.
00:11:41.000No, 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.
00:11:48.000And, 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
00:12:10.000or 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.
00:12:20.000And 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.
00:12:29.000And 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.
00:12:40.000So 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.
00:12:54.000Well, 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.
00:13:01.000We 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.
00:13:14.000But 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.
00:13:30.000It'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.
00:13:37.000So 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.
00:13:45.000Like I think health care is like a third of our federal budget or something like that.
00:13:49.000And 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?
00:13:56.000Is 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?
00:14:03.000No, 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.
00:14:09.000In every election, whenever they poll the Canadian public, what is the issue that matters most to you?
00:14:14.000The top two is always the economy and then health care.
00:14:17.000But there is no issue that is discussed less in the context of Canadian politics than health care.
00:14:23.000But the public has anxieties about it that I think are very real.
00:14:26.000You 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.
00:14:36.000Like 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.
00:14:44.000As 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.
00:14:57.000The 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.
00:15:17.000Right. That's this is one of the sort of the problems with the Canadian health care system that I always get back to.
00:15:22.000And 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.
00:15:36.000Health care being a good example where it's basically a kind of subsidy for a kind of middle class lifestyle. Right.
00:15:42.000So 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
00:15:51.000care or just for the coverage of care that they're receiving right now.
00:15:55.000They could easily afford to pay something out of pocket to to sort of feed into the health care that they receive.
00:16:03.000Or just even to keep the system solvent.
00:16:05.000Because in British Columbia you pay a monthly premium.
00:16:06.000We did, although the NDP government has covered it now.
00:16:08.000And it was very symbolic and very contentious even when it existed.
00:16:12.000But 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.
00:16:28.000And that somehow the freeness of the system is a reflection of the virtue that we have as Canadians.
00:16:35.000Like that we are such a perfectly compassionate, welcoming, generous people.
00:16:39.000And that's why the health care system is free.
00:16:42.000So 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.
00:16:49.000Not 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.
00:16:55.000It's because I'm so great and I'm a great Canadian and I'm so compassionate that I shouldn't have to pay.
00:17:00.000If you understand the point that I'm trying to make here.
00:17:02.000Yeah, 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.
00:17:08.000Well, it's just kind of like that, you know, demonstrably if we were asked to pay a little bit more.
00:17:14.000If 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.
00:17:21.000Yeah, you'd remove those people from the wait list.
00:17:23.000Well, it's kind of like, it's sort of like when you have private schools versus public schools, right?
00:17:29.000Like it's often, the teachers unions often get exercise that the government gives any money at all to private schools.
00:17:34.000But 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,
00:17:43.000which then allows the public system to have more resources, you know, more funding per student per capita, all of these kinds of things.
00:17:50.000The same logic could easily apply to the health care system.
00:17:52.000But, 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.
00:18:02.000When 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.
00:18:11.000But 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.
00:18:25.000Yeah. 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.
00:18:34.000So 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.
00:18:48.000So another one of your contentious viewpoints is to do with Quebec.
00:18:52.000I'll kind of tie these two together because you have one sort of about the role of Quebec within confederation is really interesting.
00:18:58.000But 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.
00:19:14.000So how did you come to these views and maybe you can kind of help re-articulate them?
00:19:18.000Well, 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.
00:19:39.000Right. 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.
00:19:51.000There 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.
00:20:11.000So 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.
00:20:23.000So 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.
00:20:38.060But 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.
00:20:48.020But 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.
00:20:56.280When, 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?
00:21:08.880It's like a fluently bilingual, right? Fluently bilingual, former cabinet minister, fluently bilingual, you know, former executive of this or that.
00:21:16.540And 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.
00:21:25.200You know, but unfortunately, it is treated extraordinarily seriously.
00:21:30.360And as a result, we are cleaving something like 80 percent of Canadians who are not fluent in both French and English.
00:21:36.280Right 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.
00:21:46.760Only 9 percent of Canadians who speak English as their first language are fluent in French and English.
00:21:51.480And those are disproportionately English Canadians who live in Quebec, right, which is to say Montreal, right?
00:21:57.300So you're talking about like an extraordinarily tiny slice of the Canadian public that then because of this kind of like fantasy of bilingualism,
00:22:05.540you'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,
00:22:12.520can be chief justice of the Supreme Court, can be governor general, can be head of the armed forces.
00:22:16.820You 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,
00:22:24.760we'd say this is not really a proper democracy.
00:22:28.240Like this is some sort of deformed elitist society that is sort of set up in a way that privileges this certain elite.
00:22:36.800And 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
00:22:42.160and don't think of themselves as being particularly elite. And that's fine. I'm sensitive to them.
00:22:46.300But 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,
00:22:54.300you know, often they're from bilingual families, you know.
00:22:57.300A good example is Prime Minister Trudeau.
00:23:00.260You know, he literally grew up in a house, you know, as the son of a prime minister,
00:23:04.180where like his father would speak, you know, English to him on one floor of the mansion
00:23:08.120and French on another floor of the mansion.
00:23:10.780Yeah. Like in order to like make him the perfectly bilingual, you know, specimen.
00:23:15.020Right. And then with other families that have means, you know, they put their kids into French immersion at a very young age.
00:23:21.340Or, you know, they go on like immersion trips to France or, you know, or they put them in, you know,
00:23:27.640immersive schools of other sorts, universities and this sort of thing.
00:23:31.120Like they put a lot of effort and means into like turning their kids into a perfectly bilingual person because of the ambition.
00:23:38.140Right. But, you know, most Canadians, this is not remotely one of their first priorities in life.
00:23:42.680To most Canadians, French is a distant, exotic and for all intents and purposes, foreign language that does not make any logical sense to learn.
00:23:50.080And that's the other thing that we have to be very clear about is that learning another language is very difficult.
00:23:56.380And 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,
00:24:07.460not perceived need in the context of like, well, I might want to be prime minister someday, therefore I should learn French.
00:24:13.120It's like, no, do I need this language to communicate with people that are around me in a day to day fashion,
00:24:19.320which is why Montrealers become fluently bilingual, because that is a bicultural bilingual society.
00:24:25.000A person out here in British Columbia, they might want to learn how to speak fluent French for political reasons,
00:24:31.060but it's going to be extraordinarily difficult for them to achieve the level of fluency that the political class, that the media,
00:24:37.420and certainly that the Quebecers that we're all supposed to be so anxious about would consider sufficient,
00:24:42.380because, you know, you do not gain pure fluency just by reading books or by watching movies.
00:24:47.920You gain it by using it in a day to day basis.
00:24:49.860So 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.
00:25:02.340Yeah. Well, just to back up your point.
00:25:03.940So 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.
00:25:11.300Like I never, ever interacted with one.
00:25:13.340And I think that a lot of students at my school, you kind of resent French because it's forced upon you.
00:25:17.560And it is sort of very like, you know, the establishment says that you must speak French because we're this bilingual country.
00:25:23.660But if you grow up in Vancouver, I mean, you're far more likely to interact with Mandarin speakers or, you know, any.
00:25:29.580I 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.
00:25:37.360And so it does seem like a little bit odd and foreign that, you know, even if you take a little bit in school,
00:25:43.400you take a class or something that doesn't lead to the kind of fluency required to, say, be willing to get into federal politics.
00:25:50.280And I think what you what you get is, you know, you end up even of the Conservative Party when it comes to leaders.
00:25:55.840You 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.
00:26:03.920But, you know, if you if you read a little bit about Andrew Scheer, he grew up in Ottawa.
00:26:07.120His parents were, I think, bureaucrats where his father worked for the Ottawa citizen and his mother was in the in the civil service.
00:26:13.180So, you know, he is kind of like an insider establishment fellow that sort of ended up becoming a wearing the moniker of like peripopulism.
00:26:21.020But really, he wasn't. He was part of this sort of Laurentian elite.
00:26:24.640No, 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.
00:26:31.520Right. Like Andrew Scheer was in his early 20s when he was elected to parliament.
00:26:34.580The 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.
00:26:41.200Right. 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.
00:26:49.000Again, like you're in a milieu in which you're getting a lot of reinforcement for your bilingualism.
00:26:54.920Like if if Andrew Scheer wanted to practice his French and all the rest of it, he obviously had a lot of opportunities.
00:26:59.940So 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.
00:27:07.520Like he's just interested in language for its own sake. And, you know, he can speak Spanish as well.
00:27:12.220And 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,
00:27:21.660certainly when you're from a non Montreal, Ottawa sort of part of the country.
00:27:26.640And 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,
00:27:43.760you know, who was elected to Ottawa at age 20 and has only ever thought about politics in the context of Parliament Hill.
00:27:49.480And I think that that's really like I wrote a piece about this for The Washington Post the other day.
00:27:54.240Like, I think that when we're talking about, like, why is the Conservative Party not better?
00:27:58.640Why is Canada's ruling elite in general not better?
00:28:01.120You have to look at structural explanations as much as just kind of like ideological theories in that.
00:28:06.340And 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,
00:28:11.880it's that I want to talk more about structural factors that explain things.
00:28:15.680And it is frustrating to me that people don't talk about the structural role that bilingualism has played in limiting and, you know,
00:28:24.560causing the degree of conformity of thought that we see in the Canadian political class.
00:28:29.240And so I know that it's seen as a controversial thing to question.
00:28:33.040Like you said, oh, I'm a controversial person.
00:28:35.660But I just like to me, it shouldn't be controversial.
00:28:38.680Like, 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.
00:28:44.860And we should be able to reexamine it.
00:29:01.100Certainly, like, Canadians from another generation have, you know, like a lot of hangups about it.
00:29:06.400Like, 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.
00:29:17.000But, you know, like our generation, like being younger, I just think it's time to, like, reexamine some of these things.
00:29:22.660And 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.
00:29:29.180It was a kind of solution to the perceived problems of his time.
00:29:32.880But I'm sort of saying, you know, it's now literally been 50 years since that piece of legislation was passed.
00:29:37.920It'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?
00:29:46.980And I think the unintended consequences are quite ample.
00:29:50.640I think that you could say that it was aspirational.
00:29:53.040Like, 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.
00:30:01.080But can you really just, like, impose that through a top-down edict that says, like, okay, we're all bilingual now.
00:30:06.560You know, like you said 50 years later, it's not really the case because most people don't live that way.
00:30:10.200Like, it doesn't actually change your day-to-day life just because, you know, some politician told you that you have to learn French.
00:30:15.520As I said, I remember resenting French class because I just thought it was so annoying.
00:30:19.660Like, I would way rather learn Spanish so that when I go to Mexico, I can talk to people or whatever, you know.
00:30:24.860But 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.
00:30:34.960I would feel resentful if there was a prime minister that didn't really speak English.
00:30:39.040And 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.
00:30:52.460Can you communicate to each other in a single language?
00:30:55.840And I think that when it comes to French, a lot of people in Western Canada wouldn't care.
00:31:00.100If 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.
00:31:07.900Like, 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.
00:31:17.000But none of them speak French, so they're just, like, out of the question.
00:31:19.280And I think that a lot of people in Western Canada would be, like, who cares?
00:31:22.400Just, you know, let's run and see what happens.
00:31:24.740Whereas 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.
00:31:36.620I 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.
00:31:49.280Take seriously, or at least are purported to take seriously, that people in Western Canada just don't think of at all, right?
00:31:56.360But, 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?
00:32:08.660I mean, I know that to some Quebecers, it doesn't matter how bilingual you are, you're never bilingual enough.
00:32:15.120But for the purposes of the argument, we'll just say Stephen Harper was fluently bilingual, Andrew Scheer was fluently bilingual.
00:32:22.460A lot of good that did them in Quebec, right?
00:32:24.960The 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.
00:32:35.980You 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.
00:32:43.480And that's despite, you know, like I said, a succession of fluently bilingual leaders.
00:32:49.040And certainly, like, you could say the same thing about the NDP.
00:32:51.580They've had nothing but bilingual leaders.
00:32:54.400They did well in Quebec for a brief window of time, and that has now come to a close.
00:32:59.120Well, when they were running someone from Quebec.
00:33:05.000It's to what extent do Quebecers care about the language side versus to what degree do they just want a Quebecer on the ballot?
00:33:11.440One of the biggest determinants of how Quebecers will vote is just whether or not that party leader happens to be from Quebec.
00:33:17.260This is the case for the Liberal Party as well as the Conservatives or the NDP or anyone else, right?
00:33:22.180Mulroney, not incidentally, who was the last Conservative leader to do well in Quebec, was also the last Conservative leader from Quebec.
00:33:28.680So, 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?
00:33:40.840Jack Layton was from Quebec in a way Jagmeet Singh obviously isn't, right?
00:33:45.220Even Thomas Mulcair did better than Jagmeet Singh, who was also from Quebec.
00:33:48.460So, 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.
00:34:00.480And 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.
00:34:08.940The Liberals can commit to the principle all they want because I think they believe in it deeply, like, as a matter of ideological principle.
00:34:14.480Like, 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.
00:34:40.100It's obviously not the case in reality. But the Conservatives are much less in hock to that delusion.
00:34:45.400I 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.
00:34:54.760So, 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?
00:35:09.520Because I think one of your other criticisms of the Conservative Party of Canada is that they're not really all that conservative.
00:35:15.820When 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.
00:35:28.560The 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.
00:35:38.780You know, when it comes to health care, they're not willing to have those conversations.
00:35:42.200They'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.
00:35:52.160Like, 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.
00:36:00.740So 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?
00:36:10.780What would you like to see as we transition here to a new leader?
00:36:13.740Yeah, I mean, I think that all the things that you said are entirely correct.
00:36:17.560Another issue that you didn't mention, but I know it's important to you, would be immigration as well.
00:36:21.860Like, you don't see a lot of differentiation on the two parties there.
00:36:25.640But 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,
00:36:31.980certainly within, like, the high ranks of the party, not only the leaders, but, like, the people around them,
00:36:36.540are 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.
00:36:47.060And if you hang out with them in an intimate setting, they'll tell you those things very openly, right?
00:36:50.880Like, and they all, you know, they watch Fox News, they cheer on Trump, you know, they read the National Review.
00:36:56.340Like, 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.
00:37:06.540They just are playing a very different political game that I think is often very condescending and patronizing
00:37:12.560because it's based around the premise that, like, the Canadian people are, like, very fragile and very delicate
00:37:17.780and cannot handle that kind of stiff medicine and therefore need to, like, be given this very sort of gentle, incrementalist,
00:37:25.720super ultra-watered-down version of the truth, right?
00:37:30.960And I find that really, I mean, it is patronizing, as I said, and it's kind of depressing because it's, like,
00:37:37.060if you believe in those things as a matter of policy, if you're happy to cheer on, you know,
00:37:41.500Trump appointing Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court or what have you,
00:37:45.280but you're not willing to do the equivalent of that in this society,
00:37:48.240well, then, you know, you're committing, like, a great offence to the Canadian people, right?
00:37:53.280You're denying them your own wisdom as you believe it for the sake of political expediency,
00:37:58.980which is to say for the sake of power for its own sake.
00:38:01.840Like, that's a form of extreme moral cowardice, and I think it's really appalling.
00:38:07.760And, I mean, I don't quite know how you sort of course-correct.
00:38:11.940I mean, like, the thing with Andrew Scheer, I think, was very interesting about the whole issue with the social issues, right?
00:38:19.380Sort of the conventional narrative is that's what brought him down, right?
00:38:22.960But part of, I think, what brought him down was that this hidden agenda thing does have some validity to it, right?
00:38:30.640Like, Andrew Scheer says he's personally pro-life.
00:38:33.180If you are pro-life, then you believe that abortion is one of the great moral crimes of our time
00:38:37.800and that it's something that a sort of a sane society should not practice to the extent we do.
00:38:42.860Okay, 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
00:38:51.140as a man who, in theory, has the ability to change laws and so forth, right?
00:38:54.920It either means that you're like a complete moral coward who's involved in politics for completely amoral reasons
00:39:00.060or that you maybe do have a hidden agenda that people are rightly, should be, you know, people on the left or what have you,
00:39:06.320are right to be suspicious of because it just does not make sense that you could believe that and not act upon it
00:39:12.460unless you're just this completely cynical creature, right?
00:39:15.440And 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
00:39:21.820and actually talk about what it is that they believe, articulate what it means to be a conservative,
00:39:26.700sort of why they believe these things and why their vision of the country and of politics and of morality and ethics
00:39:33.740and whatever else you want to get into actually meaningfully differs from what the parties of the left believe and are pushing.
00:39:40.260You know, tell us how, I mean, it sounds very simple to say, but it's like,
00:39:43.800tell us why your ideas are better and are going to make the country better, which is different than saying policy, right?
00:39:50.660Policy is a very nuanced and specific thing.
00:39:53.580And, you know, the parties can make these big volumes of, you know, their manifestos for the election.
00:39:58.620It's full of all these specific policy things.