The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 211. Voice of the Canadian West

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00:00:51.060 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast, season 4, episode 68.

00:00:59.360 In today's episode, Dad gets a good glimpse into politics in Canada with his guest, Preston Manning.

00:01:05.560 Preston Manning shares his thoughts about growing up in a political family and offers advice to anyone interested in starting a career in politics.

00:01:11.920 They talk about populism, the Chinese Communist Party, the various movements in the West.

00:01:19.940 Check out this episode to see how faith plays a role in politics, how slavery ended in Britain, and the development of the Reform Party of Canada.

00:01:28.220 I hope you enjoy this episode.

00:01:41.920 Hello, everyone.

00:01:50.060 I'm pleased to be talking today with Mr. Preston Manning, PCCCAOE.

00:01:57.160 He's the founder of the Manning Foundation for Democratic Education and the Manning Centre for Building Democracy,

00:02:03.820 which seek to strengthen the knowledge, skills, principles, and ethical foundations of participants in Canada's political processes.

00:02:11.920 Born in 1942, Preston Manning is the second son of long-time Alberta Premier Ernest C. Manning,

00:02:18.820 who was also a prominent Christian layman and broadcaster.

00:02:22.980 Growing up in a household which was both political and evangelical,

00:02:26.980 he became intimately familiar with the political and religious experience of Western Canada.

00:02:31.640 He has written and spoken extensively on navigating the faith-political interface.

00:02:36.820 He served as Member of Parliament from 1993 to 2001 and founded two political parties,

00:02:43.200 the Reform Party of Canada and the Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance,

00:02:47.420 both of which became the official opposition in the Canadian Parliament,

00:02:51.040 and laid the foundation for the Conservative Party of Canada.

00:02:54.200 He served as leader of the opposition from 1997 to 2000 and was also his party's science and technology critic.

00:03:01.280 In 2007, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada and in 2013 was appointed to the Privy Council.

00:03:09.320 Mr. Manning graduated from the University of Alberta with a BA in Economics

00:03:13.180 and provided consulting services to the energy industry for 20 years before entering the political arena.

00:03:19.580 He has received honorary degrees from eight Canadian universities and is the author of three books,

00:03:24.660 The New Canada, Think Big, and Faith, Leadership, and Public Life.

00:03:30.260 He's currently working on a new book, tentatively entitled,

00:03:33.660 Do Something! 365 Ways to Strengthen Democracy and Conservatism in Canada.

00:03:39.900 Mr. Manning and his wife, Sandra, divide their time between Calgary, Alberta, and Vancouver, BC.

00:03:45.860 They have five grown children and 12 grandchildren.

00:03:49.480 Mr. Manning, it's really good to see you again. It's been a long time.

00:03:52.600 It is, yeah. Good to see you, Jordan. Great to be with you.

00:03:55.860 Thank you, thank you.

00:03:56.820 We met, originally, I asked you to come and speak to a group that I had hosted at the University of Toronto

00:04:03.300 for a while, a group of intellectuals, and I was really interested in your experiences founding a political party

00:04:09.320 because that's a very, very difficult thing to do and to bring it to fruition and to make it successful.

00:04:14.000 It became the second largest political party in Canada.

00:04:18.440 And so you were kind enough to share that entire experience with us.

00:04:22.320 So I remember, at that point, there was enough divisiveness in Canada with regards to political issues

00:04:27.200 that one of the attendees at that seminar was, there was about 30 of them, wouldn't attend.

00:04:33.760 And so that was, you know, not so good, but it was a very interesting job.

00:04:38.000 Understandable, yes, yes.

00:04:39.280 Well, like the party I was involved in actually goes back to recognizing there's two parts of Canada that have third-party traditions

00:04:49.460 that don't regularly go back and forth between the traditional Conservative Party and the Liberal Party.

00:04:55.680 One is Quebec, which has a whole third-party tradition, the Bloc Québécois, the Parti Québécois, the Rally Montecréditiste.

00:05:03.660 It goes back a long way.

00:05:05.020 And then Western Canada has a tradition of producing new political parties, the old Progressive Party,

00:05:11.120 the Farmers' Parties, the Depression Parties of the Canadian Commonwealth Federation and the Social Credit Party.

00:05:18.080 And then reform, which we started, was part of another attempt to advance Western Canadian interest

00:05:25.880 by the creation of a new political party.

00:05:28.420 Probably the lesson out of reform, I get asked that a long time.

00:05:31.500 What's the biggest lesson?

00:05:33.420 I don't think it's the particular accomplishments of reform in an ideological or policy sense,

00:05:42.240 but it's just the fact that—and I've been a great critic of Canadian democracy.

00:05:46.660 I think Canadian democracy could be improved.

00:05:48.960 But notwithstanding all its flaws, a small group of five people who met in a boardroom in Calgary in 1987

00:05:56.360 and decided we don't like either of the current political options and we're going to do something different,

00:06:01.700 we're able to take the tools that our democracy gives to everybody—freedom of speech, freedom of association,

00:06:08.000 freedom to try to persuade you to vote this way rather than that way—and we're able to create a new political party.

00:06:15.000 We've kept broadening it out, coalition building, et cetera, et cetera, creating that Canadian alliance.

00:06:20.440 And then Stephen Harper and Peter McKay, who was the leader of the old Progressive Conservative Party in Canada,

00:06:25.620 took it one more step and actually got to a minority government and then a majority government.

00:06:31.480 The fact that you could still do that under our democratic system and in the 21st century,

00:06:38.760 I think should be encouraging to people.

00:06:43.020 If you don't like what's happening, you can change it.

00:06:45.320 And a small group of people can change it using the tools that democracy gives to everybody.

00:06:49.960 Yeah, so there's a couple of questions there.

00:06:52.100 I mean, it seems to me that maybe Western Canada and Quebec have generated additional political parties,

00:06:58.380 some of them more to the left than traditional parties, and some of them more to the right,

00:07:03.440 is because perhaps the West and Quebec have had the most uneasy relationship with Confederacy

00:07:08.960 and so are prone now and then to generate new political forms.

00:07:13.580 So do you think that's a reasonable analysis or is there something else going on?

00:07:17.080 Oh, I think it is.

00:07:19.640 And, you know, Canada is a huge country, the second largest country by landmass in the world,

00:07:25.260 and it has distinctive regional differences and diversity, not just geographic,

00:07:31.360 but demographically and every other way.

00:07:33.340 And so it's not surprising that that should be the case.

00:07:37.060 One of the things I point out in my most recent book is actually out now,

00:07:40.560 there's do something for 365 ways to strengthen Canada.

00:07:45.440 I point out to my Quebec friends, and this can often be misunderstood,

00:07:48.840 that in the long run, Quebec is going to have to find an ally somewhere else in Canada

00:07:54.040 than just relying on getting its influence with the federal government.

00:07:58.200 And I have a graph that shows the percentage of French speakers versus English speakers going down,

00:08:03.640 the percentage of Quebec population in relation to total Canadian population going down,

00:08:09.000 Quebec proportion of the GDP in relation to Canadian GDP going down.

00:08:13.960 And I say what that suggests, and I say this to my Quebec friends,

00:08:17.280 you're going to have to find an ally in somewhere else in the country,

00:08:21.260 not just in Ottawa, to advance your interest and a place you couldn't find them.

00:08:26.480 And this always surprised them because they think the West is anti-Quebec.

00:08:29.680 I say you could find them in the West because what we want and you want

00:08:34.460 is a more decentralized federation.

00:08:37.000 You want a more decentralized federation for social, cultural, linguistic reasons.

00:08:42.660 The West wants it for economic reasons,

00:08:44.620 but the common ground is a more decentralized federation.

00:08:48.220 Now, whether that unholy alliance between Quebec and the West would ever occur,

00:08:54.480 I don't know.

00:08:55.460 When we got to Ottawa, like we got to Ottawa in 1993, in the 1993 election,

00:09:02.480 reform got 52 members, all from Western Canada, except one from Ontario.

00:09:08.840 And Quebec, the Bloc Quebecois got 54 members, just two members different.

00:09:15.420 Another aside there, we lost three seats in Edmonton by 320 votes.

00:09:20.600 If we had got those three seats, a federalist party would have been the official opposition

00:09:27.680 in the 1993 parliament instead of a separatist parliament.

00:09:31.160 And if the country had ever blown apart because the separatists won the referendum in Quebec,

00:09:35.760 I was going to go back to Edmonton and say there's 325 people here because they didn't vote.

00:09:42.600 Don't think your vote doesn't make a difference.

00:09:44.660 Yeah, well, you made two points there.

00:09:46.960 You know, one is that important decisions can be swayed by a very tiny number of people from time to time.

00:09:53.960 And also, and this is one of the things I thought was particularly fascinating about what you did,

00:09:58.480 is that the democratic processes are sufficiently permeable so that you can modify them substantially

00:10:04.680 with considerable work, but with a small number of people.

00:10:09.140 Oh, yes, yes.

00:10:10.520 And just to finish the Quebec-West connection, when we got there, we put on a breakfast for the Bloc.

00:10:17.420 We got 100 new members, over 100 new members in the parliament, huge turnover, none of whom knew each other.

00:10:23.620 So I got a hold of Lucien Bouchard, the leader of the Bloc Quebecois,

00:10:27.480 and said we ought to get together, you know, and we'll have a breakfast.

00:10:29.820 We'll put on a breakfast.

00:10:30.660 We'll bring the pancake from the West.

00:10:32.100 You'll bring the maple syrup from Quebec, and we'll have a get-go.

00:10:36.020 And we did.

00:10:36.840 I got up and gave a speech and said, we're the bunch from Western Canada discontented with how the Federation is working right now.

00:10:43.580 We want to fix it.

00:10:44.500 We want to change it.

00:10:45.340 We want to reform it.

00:10:46.700 And Lucien got up and said, we're a bunch from Quebec who are not happy with Confederation, and we want to get out.

00:10:52.980 And that's where we ended up.

00:10:56.060 Anyway, that's sort of a decide on the – but the other dimension of Western Canadian politics,

00:11:01.620 and this is very relevant to some of the subjects you've discussed, is there is no region of North America

00:11:08.500 that has had more experience with populist movements, populist parties, and populist governments than Western Canada.

00:11:17.960 And there's a lot of lessons to be learned from that.

00:11:20.020 The old progressive party, which was like the progressives in the United States in some respect,

00:11:26.800 was basically a Western-based, bottom-up, not top-down party.

00:11:31.860 The farmers' parties that governed in Alberta, governed in Manitoba, briefly governed in Ontario,

00:11:37.740 were bottom-up populist parties.

00:11:40.100 Both the Depression parties, the CCF, the Socialist Party, was a bottom-up party.

00:11:47.380 Social Credit in Alberta was a bottom-up party.

00:11:50.500 And reform, in many respects, too, was one of those populist parties.

00:11:54.480 So the Western had a lot of experience, not just with populist movements and not just populist parties,

00:12:00.620 populist governments that actually got into power.

00:12:03.400 And I think there's lessons to be learned from that with the populist movements of today

00:12:09.800 and how you respond to them and how you lead them and how you handle them.

00:12:13.780 So how would you define a populist movement?

00:12:16.060 And do you think the fact that that was able to find expression in the West continually was an advantage or a disadvantage?

00:12:22.080 Well, there's two questions there.

00:12:24.200 Well, first of all, I define it as a bottom-up rather than a top-down political movement,

00:12:29.880 but a lot of grassroots support and agitation rather than something coming down from the top.

00:12:35.100 The other way I define it is populist parties and governments are almost always a product

00:12:40.400 of the previous administrations that preceded it.

00:12:46.060 I see Trump as the legacy of Obama.

00:12:51.240 Doug Ford is the legacy of Catherine Wynne in Ontario

00:12:54.640 because you have an administration, a party before, that gets support from a lot of people,

00:13:01.120 usually from the elites, but a lot of other people as well.

00:13:03.440 But it progressively loses contact and support with 50% of the population.

00:13:10.080 And if it does that long enough, it will generate populist movements.

00:13:14.680 So populist movements are very much a product of what was there before

00:13:19.260 and whether it accepted or alienated large chunks of the population.

00:13:24.640 So is that something that you see as a positive force altogether?

00:13:29.640 Because populism most often gets a bad name.

00:13:32.380 Yeah, well, I'd come at that.

00:13:33.700 Again, Western Canada's experience is, I mean, populist movements have their wild side

00:13:38.760 and they can have their extreme side and they can be dangerous.

00:13:41.920 But I would argue they also have a positive potential.

00:13:45.700 And just again, take the Western Canadian experience.

00:13:48.600 The first woman elected to the federal parliament was Agnes Campbell McPhail.

00:13:54.540 How did she get there?

00:13:55.580 She did not get there through the Liberal Party.

00:13:58.260 She did not get there through the Conservative Party.

00:14:01.740 In fact, they bitterly fought her election in every election she contested.

00:14:05.600 She got there through the old progressive party, the bottom-up party.

00:14:09.180 The famous five, the so-called famous Alberta Five that got women recognized as persons under Canadian law.

00:14:18.660 Four out of the five of those were members of populist movements and populist governments.

00:14:23.860 So this is an accomplishment, the recognition of women as persons,

00:14:27.420 the achievement of women getting elected to the legislation of parliament was a populist achievement,

00:14:32.640 not an establishment achievement.

00:14:34.380 And then the Depression Party, the CCF, the Socialist Party, whom I don't agree with,

00:14:40.220 but one of their accomplishments was to get Canadian Medicare.

00:14:44.060 Whether you agree with that or not, most people think that was a progressive development.

00:14:47.960 You can argue about how it's done and what needs to be done in the future.

00:14:51.220 But that came through a bottom-up, provincial, populist party.

00:14:56.060 And in Alberta, the social credit regime, one of the big worries, if you're the government

00:15:02.820 and the party in power in a region that gets an oil boom, is the danger of corruption.

00:15:08.400 It happened in Texas.

00:15:09.600 It happened in Oklahoma.

00:15:10.700 It happened in Louisiana.

00:15:11.760 It happened in California.

00:15:12.900 It happened in Alaska.

00:15:14.420 The federal administration of Warren G.

00:15:16.400 Harding was brought down by a corruption through the oil patch.

00:15:20.400 Somebody tried to bribe a federal cabinet minister in order to get drilling rights in a federal party.

00:15:25.660 It almost discredited the Warren administration.

00:15:29.380 And one of the great fears in Alberta was, okay, we had this oil boom in 1947,

00:15:34.960 and my father was the premier then, was how do you keep that from corrupting the people in power?

00:15:41.080 And it was a populist party that managed to not get corrupted.

00:15:46.300 Now, I remember you speaking about beginning your political party.

00:15:51.700 You told me, correct me if I'm wrong, but you told me that you went from town to town,

00:15:56.220 from city to city, across Western Canada, and you had a speech or a variety of speeches

00:16:00.700 that you gave, but that you were most involved in some sense with the question and answer sessions.

00:16:06.600 And that enabled you to sample what people were thinking about, what their concerns were,

00:16:11.020 and to weave that into policy.

00:16:12.800 So that became part of a discussion between an emergent political party and the constituents.

00:16:17.340 Oh, yeah. And I think that's a distinguishing feature of populist parties.

00:16:23.000 It's a receiver-oriented form of communication.

00:16:25.440 When you start not by what do I want to say to these people, and what do I want them,

00:16:30.960 you start with who are these people?

00:16:33.300 What are they concerned about? Why are they here?

00:16:35.460 Why is that lady in the third row who's probably got kids at home and had to make arrangements to come?

00:16:39.840 What on earth is she doing at this political meeting?

00:16:42.720 How would she say what I want to say to them if she was trying to explain it to her friends next door?

00:16:48.480 And I used to get a lot of...

00:16:52.400 I would hang around after the meeting, and not just for the purpose of shaking hands and,

00:16:56.560 how are you, and please vote for me.

00:16:58.300 Listen hard to what people were saying to you.

00:17:01.680 And eventually, they'll try to say back to you what they thought you were saying to them.

00:17:05.820 Right, right.

00:17:06.460 I would say my father became premier in 1943 when I was one year old, and he was premier for 25 years

00:17:12.940 before he resigned undefeated 25 years later.

00:17:15.840 So I spent my entire life in a political home.

00:17:19.700 And in the 1960s, John Diefenbaker, who was campaigning to be prime minister, became prime minister,

00:17:25.940 came...

00:17:26.480 There was a couple of elections in the 60s, and he came through Edmonton and Calgary, where we lived.

00:17:31.560 And my father said, you should go and listen to John.

00:17:34.360 And he said, watch particularly what he does in the first five or six minutes of his talk.

00:17:38.740 So I went to the Edmonton Jubilee Auditorium, where you used to come to the Jubilee Auditorium.

00:17:42.620 By the time I got there, it was packed full of people.

00:17:44.820 You couldn't find a place to seat.

00:17:46.420 But they were seating the media on the stage behind them.

00:17:49.800 So I pretended I was a media person.

00:17:51.620 I ended up sitting about 20 feet behind him.

00:17:54.820 And I watched the first five or six minutes.

00:17:56.900 He had a big loose-leaf book on the podium, and he kind of kept flipping it and saying

00:18:03.620 a little bit about that, a little bit about this, looking this way, looking that way, looking

00:18:07.720 in the balcony like that.

00:18:09.540 And it didn't seem to make any rhyme or reason as to what he was saying, why, and in that

00:18:14.300 direction.

00:18:15.120 Then all of a sudden, he stopped that, and he honed in on three things, bing, bang, boom.

00:18:20.520 And that was the theme of his talk.

00:18:22.100 And what my father said afterwards, what he's doing, Rediefenbaker was a defense lawyer,

00:18:28.100 very experienced in reading juries.

00:18:30.500 What he's doing, he's like a bat.

00:18:32.220 He's sending out signals and watching what bounces back.

00:18:36.560 And he gets a reading of where the audience is at.

00:18:39.360 Why did that guy go like this?

00:18:41.720 Why did that guy-

00:18:42.020 And so then, was he speaking without notes from then on in?

00:18:46.680 Well, yeah, he was very polished by that time.

00:18:48.940 He had some notes there, but I don't think he really needed them.

00:18:52.360 But I think this, again, this business of trying to read your audience.

00:18:56.340 When I was in the consulting business, we actually developed a questionnaire for receiver-oriented

00:19:01.840 communications.

00:19:02.800 What do you have to have?

00:19:03.740 Questions do you have?

00:19:04.560 Who are these people?

00:19:05.520 What do they believe?

00:19:06.360 How would they say?

00:19:07.100 What's their vocabulary?

00:19:07.960 What's their conceptual framework?

00:19:09.460 And then given that, okay, given that, now how do I frame my message?

00:19:13.900 What do I say in order to get to them?

00:19:16.380 I know when I was lecturing constantly, large crowds, you know, I was always watching individuals

00:19:22.660 within the crowd.

00:19:23.620 I never spoke to the crowd as a whole.

00:19:25.860 I would pick people and talk to them for 15 seconds or so, and then pick someone else.

00:19:30.140 And by looking at individuals, I could tell if people were following what I was saying,

00:19:34.700 and I could turn the lecture into a conversation.

00:19:37.140 I mean, they weren't speaking, but I got all the nonverbal cues.

00:19:40.300 And if you use notes or a prepared talk, you obliterate that relationship with the audience.

00:19:45.200 Oh, yeah.

00:19:46.320 And if you can meet with people after and say, I used to do that and listen to them,

00:19:51.080 it would affect my next presentation.

00:19:53.540 One of the classics on that was when Canada got into this, during the Mulroney government

00:19:59.680 years, constitutional reform was what was required to unite the country.

00:20:04.620 And there was this constitutional, Charlottetown constitutional accord that was negotiated

00:20:10.020 between the federal government, the provincial governments.

00:20:12.020 They all agreed on it, this would solve our unity problems, particularly the difficulties

00:20:16.260 with Quebec.

00:20:17.780 And I had a long, legalistic, dry speech on why all the previous attempts to unite the

00:20:25.440 country through constitutional change had usually failed for a bunch of reasons.

00:20:30.220 Yes, often disastrously.

00:20:31.780 Yes.

00:20:32.060 But it was dry and dull and legalistic.

00:20:34.780 You put your, I even put my wife to sleep, let alone the audience.

00:20:39.120 But after one of these meetings where I did that, I was talking to this fella and he said,

00:20:45.720 you know, he's trying to say to me something along the lines of, he says, we're like kids

00:20:49.340 in the back of the car, he says.

00:20:51.980 And we're trying to get to this place called National Unity.

00:20:55.020 And all we're saying is, are we there yet?

00:20:58.100 Are we there yet?

00:20:58.960 We're kids in the back of the car.

00:21:00.260 We want to get there.

00:21:01.000 But are we there yet?

00:21:01.900 Are we on the right road?

00:21:03.420 Well, so I reframed my whole speech.

00:21:05.800 I said, you know, Pierre Trudeau said National Unity was over near new constitutional drive.

00:21:12.080 And we let him drive the car.

00:21:13.440 And he's given people the finger out the window.

00:21:15.680 And Renny Levesque's in the back saying he's going to be sick if we don't let him out.

00:21:19.440 And then we let Joe Clark drive the car.

00:21:21.560 But Joe forgot to put gas in it.

00:21:23.320 We didn't go very far.

00:21:24.240 And then now Brian Maloney says it's over near some lake called Meech Lake.

00:21:28.040 And now he says it's over near Charlottetown.

00:21:30.000 And we're just saying that.

00:21:31.000 I could carry the whole 45-minute history of Canada's attempt to get national unity through

00:21:38.080 constitutional change by using a simple analogy suggested to me by a guy after the meeting,

00:21:42.920 trying to say the way he would say to his friends what I was trying to say to him.

00:21:47.020 And I've had that experience.

00:21:50.080 It was a 2002 federal election.

00:21:55.400 My riding was Calgary Southwest in Calgary.

00:21:59.360 And I used to ride the C train.

00:22:01.540 And I'd start a conversation, the C train, because these are my constituents.

00:22:04.720 And then I'd get off and they'd be arguing about something.

00:22:07.340 And so on the day the election was called, this was called by the Gretchen government.

00:22:10.840 There was a sponsorship scandal that was floating around.

00:22:13.160 Now, I was sitting beside a fellow, looked like he was a carpenter because he was covered

00:22:17.040 with sawdust and he had a tool kit.

00:22:19.380 And I said to him, have you heard they called a federal election today?

00:22:22.600 He said, yeah, we heard that.

00:22:24.640 And I said, some of the commentators say that that scandal, that sponsorship scandal, corruption

00:22:29.700 thing in Quebec is going to be a big issue.

00:22:33.680 Do you know anything about that?

00:22:35.140 Do you care about that?

00:22:36.280 And he didn't answer anything.

00:22:37.400 By now the years are perking up in the car and I thought maybe he's tuning me out.

00:22:43.040 He says, well, he says, it's like there's something rotten in the fridge, he said.

00:22:48.200 And we got to decide whether it's just the cheese or the yogurt or whether we got to clean

00:22:54.180 out the whole damn thing.

00:22:56.300 Well, by golly, that night I had to give a partisan speech.

00:22:59.480 And guess what my analogy was?

00:23:01.300 You know, simple, easy to understand.

00:23:04.140 It smells like there's something rotten in the fridge.

00:23:06.420 And we got to decide what to do about it.

00:23:08.400 So I was talking to Congressman Dan Crenshaw yesterday about populism in the United States.

00:23:14.560 And no, he said that his observation was that the dangerous form of populism emerges when

00:23:22.340 leaders tell the audience what they think they want to hear.

00:23:26.640 Or there's a form of manipulation going on.

00:23:29.100 But what struck me about what you told me years ago about what you did when you created

00:23:34.000 the Reform Party was that there was a tremendous amount, not so much of telling the audience

00:23:39.080 what they wanted to hear for your purposes, but listening to them so that you could extract

00:23:43.740 out policy that actually addressed people's concerns.

00:23:47.260 Yes, yes.

00:23:47.900 And we used to use the relief well analogy.

00:23:50.640 Okay.

00:23:50.860 I come from Alberta where the oil patch analogies are quite, quite common.

00:23:55.140 And in the oil patch, there's such a thing as a wildcat well that's drilled into a formation

00:24:00.700 where you don't know what's down below.

00:24:02.620 And then there's such a thing as a rogue well that hits a pocket of oil or gas under enormous

00:24:07.660 pressure.

00:24:08.300 It can be very dangerous.

00:24:09.300 It blows the drilling platform off the wellhead.

00:24:12.540 It can catch fire.

00:24:13.660 In 1948, a year after the Duke discovery, when they still didn't know the extent of the field,

00:24:20.200 there was the Atlantic number three blew out south of Edmonton.

00:24:22.960 It released more oil, 10 times the amount of oil than the Exxon Valdez in about four days.

00:24:28.680 I mean, these are huge, can be catastrophic.

00:24:32.720 But one of the ways of dealing with a rogue well is you drill in a relief well from the side.

00:24:38.640 And the angle got to be right.

00:24:40.040 If it's too shallow, it won't take off enough pressure.

00:24:42.780 If it's too deep, it can turn into a rogue well.

00:24:46.000 But if it's just right, it can take off enough pressure that they can install valves,

00:24:50.620 bring that very valuable energy under control and for useful purposes.

00:24:56.280 Particularly a useful metaphor for talking to people in Western Canada.

00:25:00.220 Well, you were also dealing with Western separatism at that time and sometimes trying to cut it

00:25:04.660 off at, to cut it, head it off at the pass.

00:25:07.540 Another Western metaphor.

00:25:09.020 Yeah.

00:25:10.000 Well, and this is what the relief well does.

00:25:12.780 Now, the reform was a relief well.

00:25:15.000 And you had to tap in to the discontent that was generating this.

00:25:19.100 So you had to identify with it.

00:25:20.480 You had to connect to it.

00:25:21.700 But then instead of saying, let's set fire to something or let's blow the lid off the government

00:25:27.760 in Ottawa, we said, let's make some changes.

00:25:31.560 Let's use this energy for some constructive purpose.

00:25:34.920 And we developed that slogan, the West wants in, not out, but it wants in on these kind

00:25:40.460 of conditions.

00:25:41.000 And I think that's the way you deal with populism is you have to identify with what's at the

00:25:49.800 roots and you have to get close to it.

00:25:51.620 So you sound a little bit like them when you're doing that.

00:25:54.180 And that's what the outside commentators would say.

00:25:55.920 Well, you're just another version of them.

00:25:57.740 No, you're identifying with it so that you can channel it into something constructive.

00:26:01.620 For our American friends, I'm a great admirer of Thomas Jefferson and his declaration of

00:26:09.980 contributions, declaration of independence, the American constitution.

00:26:13.520 But in around 1820, and he must have been, he's an old man by then.

00:26:19.860 He was asked by some colleague, if you were redoing the American constitution, where would

00:26:27.360 you still vest the ultimate powers of society?

00:26:30.060 And he said this, I would vest the ultimate powers of society in the people themselves,

00:26:38.200 and then anticipating the objection to that.

00:26:40.380 But the people themselves, they're not educated enough.

00:26:42.940 They'll go chasing after some wild man.

00:26:44.820 He was saying this when Andrew Jackson was already on the political scene, a wild guy from

00:26:50.540 the South, not a Virginian.

00:26:52.020 He would have been the Trump of his day.

00:26:53.560 And here's Jefferson, the patriarchal guy from Virginia, author of the constitution.

00:27:03.500 He's saying this with that in mind.

00:27:05.180 He says, and if you think them, the people, not fit to exercise self-government with a wholesome

00:27:10.600 discretion, the remedy is not to take self-government from them, but to inform their discretion.

00:27:16.400 That is a very profound statement.

00:27:20.140 And I'd say that to our American friends that are worried about where populism can lead,

00:27:25.060 particularly depending on who the leaders are.

00:27:28.400 Well, you're also making a case for a relationship between dangerous populism and repressed resentment

00:27:36.640 in some sense.

00:27:37.500 So the idea that you're putting forward is that, well, any group of policies in some sense is going

00:27:43.260 to generate a counterposition, and that counterposition can become increasingly alienated and resentful

00:27:49.320 until their fundamental goal is something like drain the swamp or tear the whole thing down

00:27:53.880 or et cetera, et cetera.

00:27:55.440 And so communicating with those people before it comes to that and trying to channel that

00:28:00.920 into something that's hypothetically productive within the system is obviously one of the ways

00:28:04.640 the system maintains itself.

00:28:05.820 Canada has maintained its democracy for a very long time by world standards.

00:28:10.860 I mean, everyone thinks in some sense we're a new country, but that's only true in some

00:28:15.220 ways.

00:28:16.980 Well, and there is a new wave of Western alienation, like what we faced in the late 1980s and 1993.

00:28:29.160 And you can identify what is it that these Westerners are concerned about.

00:28:34.140 And then you can try to come up with what's an answer to that.

00:28:37.960 One of the things is just inequality.

00:28:40.000 The West has always been strong on equality.

00:28:42.080 When Western provinces were created, they were not created equal with Ontario and the

00:28:46.740 Atlantic provinces and Quebec.

00:28:48.080 They were denied control of their natural resources, which was retained by the federal government,

00:28:52.640 which became a huge cause of resentment.

00:28:55.380 And then finally, they got control of their natural resources in 1930, mainly because of a progressive

00:29:01.420 group in the federal parliament, not federal liberals or conservatives, who allied with the

00:29:06.660 government of Alberta at that time and got a constitutional amendment.

00:29:09.700 But the equality, equality, equality.

00:29:12.280 And right now, the West complains on the equalization formula.

00:29:15.660 Alberta has contributed whatever it is, $500, $600 billion into the federal treasury and to

00:29:21.500 the province, other provinces.

00:29:23.120 Alberta gets into financial trouble and there's nothing coming back.

00:29:26.580 And people say, that's not fair.

00:29:27.860 That's not equal.

00:29:29.060 The whole carbon price, carbon taxing issue.

00:29:33.740 Albertans say, OK, the rationale behind that is you're saying that it's a development of a

00:29:40.180 particular type of energy, in this case, hydrocarbons, has negative environmental effects.

00:29:44.860 What we should do is identify those negative environmental effects, figure out what has to

00:29:49.440 be done to avoid or mitigate them.

00:29:51.800 And we ought to include the cost of that avoidance or mitigation in the price of the product,

00:29:56.700 either through a tax or through a pricing regime or whatever.

00:29:59.640 Isn't that the rationale?

00:30:00.700 And you can say that to public audiences in central Canada, Quebec, that can say, yeah,

00:30:05.020 that's right.

00:30:05.900 OK, but Westerners say, OK, if you're going to internalize the environmental externalities

00:30:10.020 of production of energy from hydrocarbons, why don't you do it for every other energy

00:30:14.860 source?

00:30:15.820 Sure, the hydro guys don't produce a lot of CO2, except in the amount of concrete that

00:30:21.820 they use.

00:30:22.880 But they have flooded carbon sinks in Canada the size of Lake Ontario.

00:30:28.180 So where's the reservoir tax for those guys if you're going to internalize?

00:30:32.540 The nuclear people don't produce a lot of CO2, but they produce one of the deadliest poisons

00:30:37.840 known to man, on which this country has spent billions trying to figure out what do you

00:30:42.000 do with it afterwards.

00:30:43.720 So where's the radiation tax for those guys?

00:30:47.280 Let's treat every...

00:30:48.220 Why do you think that inequality of internalizing externalized costs exists?

00:30:54.520 Because it is peculiar.

00:30:55.680 If it was driven purely by environmental concerns, I mean, you might say it's hyper-concern over

00:31:01.680 carbon per se, but that doesn't account for not paying attention to the externalized cost

00:31:07.520 of hydro.

00:31:07.960 One of the reasons, and maybe I'm being a little political here, it's one thing to penalize

00:31:12.080 the population of Alberta through a carbon tax.

00:31:15.560 It's another thing to establish a reservoir tax for Quebec hydro.

00:31:19.660 So politically, if you were the federal government, now that would be a big challenge.

00:31:26.880 Yeah, well, and it's also, you know, hydro has got a reputation, like a low resolution

00:31:31.100 reputation for being clean, whereas Alberta suffers from this, you know, it's tarred and

00:31:37.060 feathers, so to speak, with the oil sands.

00:31:39.860 And so that's a very difficult battle to fight.

00:31:42.040 I mean, the keystone cancellations seem to be a reflection of that.

00:31:45.080 Yeah, and in the end of the day, and I'm not saying at the end of the day that hydro might

00:31:50.040 not, all costs in, might still be more effective, both environmentally and energy-wise, than hydrocarbons

00:31:58.640 or solar or wind.

00:32:00.340 But the difference will not be between black and white, between zero and 1,000.

00:32:05.580 The difference between hydrocarbon energy and hydro energy will be between 600 and 700.

00:32:12.760 And eventually, eventually, this is going to catch up.

00:32:16.140 I raise this with economists.

00:32:18.740 I say, how can you argue about the merit of internalizing the negative environmental consequences

00:32:24.260 of one form of energy and not, to be consistent, argue for it for every other form of energy?

00:32:30.220 And they say, yeah, that's right, but I don't want to lead that crusade.

00:32:34.680 Sooner or later, it'll happen.

00:32:36.140 And these consumers that have been told that this form of energy is cheaper and better environment

00:32:41.460 are going to find out it's not quite what they've been told.

00:32:45.520 But we got onto this, basically, this Western passion for equality, and you can apply it

00:32:51.720 in that area to the equalization.

00:32:53.220 Well, and also the Western dependence, especially in Alberta, but also Saskatchewan, to some degree,

00:32:57.680 dependence on the oil patch and for its whole economic function.

00:33:00.720 And then this freedom, like a lot of the people that populated the West came there for freedom

00:33:07.080 from either tradition or for authoritarian regimes and that sort of thing.

00:33:11.180 There's freedom, freedom, freedom.

00:33:12.820 And that's a big thing with a lot of Westerns, including a lot of the new Canadians, not just

00:33:17.980 the old pioneers.

00:33:20.260 So they attach a lot of importance to those freedoms that are in the Charter of Rights

00:33:24.720 and Freedoms, which, in their view, existed long before the Charter.

00:33:27.520 Freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of belief, freedom of religion, freedom

00:33:32.280 of the press.

00:33:33.240 They have always believed in free trade, freedom of trade, and opposed the tariffs and protective

00:33:41.580 measures.

00:33:42.940 They want to see domestic free trade.

00:33:44.940 They say, how come we can negotiate a free trade agreement with the United States and we

00:33:48.780 have these barriers between trade, between provinces?

00:33:53.400 They want freedom of trade, freedom of choice in social services.

00:33:56.300 Why do we just have to have a semi-monopolistic position in the health sector, in the education

00:34:01.500 sector, in the social services sector?

00:34:03.180 Why can't we have a mixed system, public, private, charitable, and we get freedom to

00:34:07.060 choose where we get our social services?

00:34:09.180 There's freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom.

00:34:11.160 And anything that restricts that, including even the current restrictions due to COVID, rub people

00:34:18.480 the wrong way.

00:34:19.600 They want to see balance between, okay, we've got to have health protection, but what's

00:34:26.160 the impact of that on my civil rights and freedoms, and where's the balance between protecting

00:34:30.700 my health and protecting my civil liberties?

00:34:33.720 Where's the balance between protecting the environment and protecting the economy on which

00:34:39.640 my income depends?

00:34:40.760 These are all, and I think if Canada gets into a federal election, which it's predicted, it

00:34:46.640 will fairly soon.

00:34:48.220 A lot of these political party people, no matter what party, conservatives, liberal, green,

00:34:53.060 socialists, whatever, when they knock on the door, an increasing number of people are

00:34:56.860 saying, I want to know where you and your party stand on equalization.

00:35:01.900 I want to know where you stand on freedom of civil liberties when they're threatened by whatever.

00:35:07.020 I want to know whether you believe in economic impact assessments of environmental measures,

00:35:11.960 not just environmental impact assessments of economic measures.

00:35:16.080 I want to know where you stand on domestic free trade.

00:35:19.720 And if you can answer those questions, which are fueling this bottom-up discontent, you can

00:35:25.120 channel it into a constructive result.

00:35:28.260 If you have no answer to it, or you ignore them, or you don't know what they're talking

00:35:31.540 about, to listen to Justin Trudeau's speeches, you wouldn't get the idea it's the faintest

00:35:36.880 idea that this is out there and it needs to be answered.

00:35:41.100 You're going to see more of this Western alienation.

00:35:44.840 In fact, one question I have for you, Jordan, given your professional background, are there

00:35:49.480 psychological roots to a portion of the population is alienated, feels alienated, left out?

00:35:58.740 I have an email from a young guy, just a young guy, saying, I don't feel at home in my own

00:36:03.440 country.

00:36:04.380 And I'm leaving.

00:36:05.260 He didn't even know where he's going, but I'm not staying here.

00:36:07.420 I don't feel at home.

00:36:09.320 Is there a psychological dimension to alienation?

00:36:12.560 And is there a prescription for how you deal with it, other than what the person says is

00:36:18.920 alienated?

00:36:19.800 Well, it's a good thing for us to discuss, because it does seem to me, although I wouldn't

00:36:24.700 say it's precisely psychological.

00:36:26.240 I think it might have more to do with education, like it seems to me that most young people

00:36:32.200 and perhaps most citizens of Canada, and this might go for other democracies as well, believe

00:36:37.280 that there is very little they can do about the state of affairs within traditional political

00:36:42.460 systems.

00:36:43.280 And my experience with traditional political systems hasn't been that that's the case.

00:36:47.720 They're generally screaming out for people to participate and desperate for it.

00:36:52.260 So that's true at the party level.

00:36:53.680 It's true at virtually every level.

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00:39:42.920 And so it's not like the institutions are particularly opaque.

00:39:46.540 I mean, you can't just suddenly become prime minister, obviously.

00:39:50.920 But there's plenty of room for participation in the political process.

00:39:54.880 And it isn't clear to me that our citizens really know that or believe it.

00:39:59.400 Yeah, well, that's why I try to tell people that reform story.

00:40:02.840 Whether you agree with what reform was trying to achieve,

00:40:05.200 the fact that a small number of people could start something that ended up ultimately

00:40:10.160 with all kinds of changes and zigzags and reversals and forward moves forming a government.

00:40:16.340 This not only happened in the West.

00:40:17.960 In Lester Pearson's day, when he was prime minister,

00:40:21.860 there was a meeting of three or four guys in Montreal,

00:40:24.780 Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Gerard Pelletier, Jean Marchand.

00:40:28.900 And with the blessing of Pearson, they decided we're going to make the Liberal Party

00:40:34.180 an instrument to advance Quebec's interest.

00:40:36.660 Just three guys.

00:40:37.920 They called them the three wise men from the West, or the East.

00:40:40.900 And by golly, they did it.

00:40:42.980 So maybe if more Canadians knew our story, that our system does lend itself to change

00:40:50.080 if you'll get involved.

00:40:51.500 One of the things I advocate in this book of mine, well, I'm jumping all over the place,

00:40:56.820 but I've heard hundreds and hundreds of political speeches over the years.

00:41:02.260 And a lot of them, including many of my own, deserve to be forgotten.

00:41:05.440 But one that sticks in my mind comes way back when I first ran for parliament in the 60s

00:41:13.400 in Edmonton East, which was a multicultural rioting,

00:41:18.320 long before Toronto discovered the virtues of multiculturalism.

00:41:22.700 And I was invited to a meeting of the Latvian Society to celebrate their brief period of

00:41:30.100 independence between the wars.

00:41:31.520 And they had a speaker there, I think her name was Dr. Anna Rodovics.

00:41:36.340 And she gave this speech on the three great commandments of Western civilization.

00:41:41.740 The first one was know thyself from Socrates and the Greek tradition.

00:41:47.020 The second one was control thyself from the Hebrew lawgivers and the Roman lawgivers.

00:41:53.340 And the third was give yourself from Jesus of Nazareth.

00:41:56.560 And she elaborated, and on that first point on know yourself, like know your country,

00:42:01.800 know your people, and talking to politicians, know your constituents,

00:42:05.460 know the people you're supposed to be representing.

00:42:08.140 And in the US, if you want to run for the Republicans or Democrats, they can give you a huge book.

00:42:14.380 It's about 500 pages long, giving the complete description of the history of the Democratic Party.

00:42:21.140 I forget the name of it.

00:42:22.340 And then there's another one for the Republicans.

00:42:24.240 In Canada, there is no definitive history of the liberal party and the liberal tradition in Canada.

00:42:30.120 There's no complete definitive history of the conservative tradition.

00:42:34.040 So why do you think it is that the Americans are so much better at myth-making and storytelling

00:42:39.260 and history-building than Canadians?

00:42:41.140 I mean, they're phenomenally good at it.

00:42:43.120 I don't know.

00:42:43.740 We have people that are capable of doing it.

00:42:46.280 We have historians that are as capable of doing that as the Americans, but we haven't done it.

00:42:51.360 And one of my challenges in my book is somewhere out there, there's got to be some historians

00:42:55.660 who could produce those four books, the liberal one, the conservative one, the socialist one,

00:43:00.060 and the third-party traditions, because you can't cover Quebec and Western politics

00:43:03.600 without the third-party tradition.

00:43:05.620 And that would be enormously helpful in knowing ourselves.

00:43:10.220 And you think a university might be interested in doing that?

00:43:13.000 Well, I think you could find the funding for it.

00:43:14.860 I think you could find the funding for it.

00:43:16.220 And it's part of knowing yourself.

00:43:18.760 I use the broad jump analogy.

00:43:22.320 In the Olympics, there used to be an event called the standing broad jump, where you,

00:43:26.820 how far could you jump from a standing position?

00:43:29.240 And the record was, I don't know, eight feet or something.

00:43:31.680 It was quite phenomenal.

00:43:32.540 But then there's the running broad jump, where the record is 27 or 28 feet or whatever it is.

00:43:38.440 In other words, you can get ahead further if you get a run at it than if you start just from standing still.

00:43:44.280 And I say that to people wanting to get into political office.

00:43:48.440 There's a whole history behind all of this.

00:43:50.620 Get a run at it by knowing the background, the history, and so forth, and you'll get further than thinking politics just started the day you've discovered it, and you do it from a standing start.

00:44:00.180 Now, a cynic, with regards to your involvement in the political process, a cynic might say, well, you were born into a political family, and I presume that that also enabled you to avail yourself a variety of connections.

00:44:13.900 And so, and also produces within you a kind of deep knowledge that would be a consequence of being within a family like that.

00:44:21.000 I mean, so to what degree do you think your specialized family background, say, played a determining role in your success and your ability to do this?

00:44:28.740 Well, I think it did.

00:44:30.040 My father had a huge influence on me in that connection.

00:44:34.600 But I would generalize from that experience.

00:44:36.880 There's a lot more can be said on that than just family background.

00:44:41.100 You mentioned in my biography we have 12 grandchildren.

00:44:44.400 We actually have 13 now.

00:44:46.040 And a number of them are boys who play hockey, and a couple of them at very high levels.

00:44:50.240 So we, my wife and I, have been to an infinite number of hockey games, kids' games.

00:44:55.020 And when they're about 11 or 12, you go to the arena at 7 o'clock in the morning, 6.30 in the morning.

00:45:00.100 There's nobody there except the parents and the players.

00:45:02.820 But if you look on the back row, you look on the back row of that arena, there's a couple of guys with clipboards.

00:45:08.600 Who are those guys?

00:45:09.860 They're scouts.

00:45:11.260 They're scouts, some of them with NHL connections, scouting 11 and 12-year-olds,

00:45:15.940 trying to find somebody that maybe has the talent to play the national game at the national level.

00:45:21.740 Now, where's the political equivalent of that?

00:45:24.280 If we want to improve the quality of democracy or the quality of your political party, in my case, the Conservative Party,

00:45:30.300 where's the scouts that are out there trying to find people, not the day before they want to run for office, 10 years before,

00:45:37.620 so that you can give them some experience, give them some of the training that I got at home,

00:45:42.240 but other people can get through training programs.

00:45:44.900 And I use this, another analogy, the political watering hole analogy.

00:45:51.140 Think of our House of Commons or the provincial legislature as a watering hole in the middle of the political jungle,

00:45:56.700 to which thirsty political animals gravitate.

00:46:00.760 There are only certain paths that get to the watering hole.

00:46:03.520 One of them is the family path.

00:46:05.060 You had a family that was interested and involved in politics, and so you are, and you can come.

00:46:10.440 That's only one path.

00:46:11.660 I came by that path.

00:46:14.240 Justin Trudeau came by that path.

00:46:16.040 There's a lot of people come by that path.

00:46:18.000 But there's other paths.

00:46:19.720 There's the constituency path.

00:46:21.740 You join a political party.

00:46:23.900 You work in the constituency association.

00:46:25.860 You become the vice president.

00:46:27.220 You become the president.

00:46:28.440 The member of parliament decides to retire.

00:46:30.400 And you say, you know, I could do that.

00:46:33.600 And so you get to parliament or the legislature through the constituency path.

00:46:39.000 Chris Warkington, the member from Peace River.

00:46:41.740 I think that isn't fair of you in Peace River, your hometown.

00:46:44.700 Well, Chris was the head of his constituency association when he was 19 years of age.

00:46:50.860 And Charlie Penson was a member of parliament.

00:46:53.120 And Chris found out what it was all about.

00:46:55.040 And Chris ended up, when Charlie retired, becoming the member of parliament.

00:46:59.900 There's the civil service route.

00:47:01.660 Mackenzie King was a civil servant who observed a lot of cabinet ministers.

00:47:07.440 And I'd say, I can do what they're doing better than they're doing.

00:47:09.540 Lester Pearson was a civil servant.

00:47:11.800 He got to the watering hole through the civil service route.

00:47:15.040 There's an advocacy group.

00:47:17.180 And if you would trace these paths, there's six or seven of them to the watering hole.

00:47:21.080 If you can catch the thirsty political animal way upstream, if he's 100 yards from the watering hole,

00:47:27.620 he can smell the water, she can smell the water.

00:47:29.640 I got there this far.

00:47:30.600 I don't need any help.

00:47:31.540 I don't need any training.

00:47:32.960 But if you catch them through your recruitment and scouting system, if you catch them upstream,

00:47:39.460 then you can provide the training and the background so that when they arrive there,

00:47:43.780 they are better qualified to be a small D Democrat or to be a liberal or a conservative or whatever party affiliation

00:47:50.720 than if there was no training or preparation until they were within 100 yards of the watering hole.

00:47:57.320 I don't know if that analogy holds.

00:48:00.760 And when I got out of Parliament, or Sandra says I sounded like I was in the penitentiary, but I left the Parliament.

00:48:08.540 One of the last things I did, I interviewed the speaker and the clerk of the House of Commons and each of the provincial legislatures and a couple of the territorial ones.

00:48:18.780 And I asked them, I said, you have seen hundreds and hundreds of elected people come through here and you've seen the state of preparedness or unpreparedness of them.

00:48:26.640 If you could prescribe courses to be given to those people so that they enter prepared, this is what Cicero wrote in his diary.

00:48:35.240 You want to get in the Roman Senate, enter prepared.

00:48:38.380 The guy took 10 years preparation.

00:48:40.220 He was an ambitious son of a guy.

00:48:41.440 And so they gave me this list.

00:48:44.300 It's in my Do Something book of about 30 different things, all the way from protocol to committee procedures to lawmaking.

00:48:55.840 Some of them pointed out to become a barista at Starbucks, you need 10 to 15 hours training to know the difference between a mocha and a latte.

00:49:04.900 But you can become a lawmaker in the Parliament of Canada or in a legislation without one hour of training in lawmaking.

00:49:13.820 So they gave me this long list.

00:49:15.740 And eventually I took it to Carleton University.

00:49:19.620 Dr. Roseanne Runta was the president at that time and said, look, Carleton is in Ottawa.

00:49:23.860 Can you not put together a graduate course to provide some of this training for, you know, a prospective members of Parliament, but for legislative assistants, executive assistants, people in the political side who might become members?

00:49:39.460 And she picked up the ball and they ended up creating this Riddell graduate program in political management.

00:49:46.060 Clay Riddell was an oil patch guy in Calgary.

00:49:48.160 She came out to see him and she said, we're going to, we'd like to present this program.

00:49:52.680 We want some money from you.

00:49:54.100 And she said, it'll be nonpartisan because we can't be in anybody's pocket.

00:49:58.320 So Clay said to her, and for which nonpartisan legislature or House of Commons are you preparing me?

00:50:04.900 I mean, what she meant was, we can't be in any party's politics, but he persuaded her to call it cross-partisan.

00:50:10.140 You don't want to be in anybody's pocket, but you're going to cover all the parties.

00:50:13.120 So that program is still running, but it's a drop in the bucket.

00:50:16.060 And then at UBC, there's this Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions under Max Cameron and Professor Baird.

00:50:25.580 And they have an institute for future legislatures.

00:50:28.760 They took five or six of those things from that list and they put on a summer school for people that want to get into politics.

00:50:34.520 They're working on a project to create Democracy House, a 100-seat replica of the House of Commons with all the trimmings and all the rooms and all the rest for would-be people for training.

00:50:44.700 And I know I'm rambling on and on, but I just think this necessity of preparing elected people better for public office when they get there is an enormously important investment.

00:50:58.380 And we don't make that investment the way we could or we should.

00:51:03.160 What has the Manning Center for Democracy been doing?

00:51:06.140 Well, I'm actually retired from that.

00:51:10.040 Well, we were doing that.

00:51:11.860 We were trying to provide some of that training, putting on courses and putting on conferences.

00:51:19.460 One of the weaknesses on the conservative side, it's a congenital weakness of conservatives, perhaps because they tend to be entrepreneurial and independent.

00:51:28.760 They operate in silos.

00:51:31.500 The conservative think tanks do not do a lot together.

00:51:35.220 They're a little bit afraid of losing donors to the other think tank.

00:51:38.960 The advocacy groups, they don't do a lot together.

00:51:42.560 And sometimes they'll plan advocacy campaigns almost on the same time period in the same place when it ought to be coordinated.

00:51:49.240 So we put on these conferences and these networking events to try to get the different components of the conservative movement to at least know what each other do.

00:51:58.880 The provincial political parties do very little in cooperation with each other and very little in cooperation with the federal party.

00:52:05.560 So networking and conferencing, but not just conferencing for the sake of talking, conferencing for the sake of building relationships was one of our big objectives.

00:52:14.240 And when I retired just a year ago, we handed that function off to another group that's always been sympathetic to us called the Canada Strong and Free Network.

00:52:26.660 It's headed up by Troy Lanigan, who was a longtime president of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

00:52:31.840 And Troy's carrying on that same function that the Manning Centre did, the conferencing and the networking function that's on the conservative side.

00:52:38.760 The other thing, one of the other things we did, we detected, and you raised this with me in an email, what do you do for these younger people that are disillusioned with the whole process, politicians, parliament?

00:52:54.760 You know, I've heard young people say, I wouldn't care if they shut the parliament down for five years, what difference does it make?

00:52:59.380 And one of the problems with them is they do not identify with this left-right-center conceptualization of the political arena.

00:53:08.000 And it's a good question.

00:53:09.540 I've had them ask me, how come the political arena is divided up in accordance with the seating arrangement after the French Revolution,

00:53:17.860 when the landlords and that sat on the right and the workers' guys sat on the left?

00:53:24.280 That's where that left-right center comes from.

00:53:25.900 So why are we still using that?

00:53:27.580 So we put on these receptions for millennials, and when they came in the door, we had a bunch of posters around the room with different conceptual framers,

00:53:37.200 not the traditional left-right center, at least not that labeling.

00:53:40.840 We had a democratic conceptual framework.

00:53:45.520 Do you favor consultation with large numbers of people on public decisions and giving them a role in decision-making,

00:53:52.480 or do you favor more expert opinion and small group deciding what's best and communicating?

00:53:58.440 Where are you on that axis?

00:53:59.760 We're given stickers.

00:54:00.600 Put yourself on that axis.

00:54:02.620 We had an environmental axis.

00:54:03.960 Do you think environmental protection should be done essentially by government regulation, taxation, government initiatives,

00:54:08.980 or do you think there's a role for market mechanisms and entrepreneurial?

00:54:12.400 In a way, this has got a left-right dimension to it, but it's not quite as obvious and not stated in those terms.

00:54:17.540 And we had 15 or 16 of these alternative conceptual framers.

00:54:21.700 And interestingly enough, they were a lot more interested in discussing and debating and placing themselves in that conceptual framework

00:54:29.600 than if we had just had the old left-right center women that said, well, I'm sort of a little bit on the left on the social,

00:54:35.100 I'm a little bit on the right on economic, and I guess I'm in the center.

00:54:39.760 And it was a very uninspiring discussion.

00:54:44.500 So that's the second thing, I think, that besides training is find conceptual frameworks that people can relate to

00:54:50.720 and conduct your politics in that framework.

00:54:56.380 On the communication side of that, too, I keep coming back to communications because modern politics is so much communications.

00:55:04.220 This is asking this question, out of whose mouth would this message be most credible?

00:55:11.800 And this is a hard thing for politicians to ask because often your communications guy will say, not yours.

00:55:18.160 You know, people don't respect political people today.

00:55:21.820 So can you find someone else to say that who actually believes it that would be more credible with the audience?

00:55:28.740 And a great illustration of this, again, when I was a kid, my father gave me a long-playing record by Edward R. Murrow.

00:55:35.820 Does that name even ring a bell?

00:55:38.420 It was called I Can Hear It Now, and it was extracts from famous speeches.

00:55:43.800 And it had a speech by Woodrow Wilson after the First World War.

00:55:50.860 He's trying to convince Americans to support the League of Nations, which they were not too inclined to support.

00:55:56.640 But his speech went like this.

00:56:04.220 Oh, yeah.

00:56:05.040 Mothers who have lost their sons in France have come to me and have taken my hand and said, God bless you, Mr. President.

00:56:12.900 I advise the Congress of the United States to create the situation that led to the deaths of their sons.

00:56:19.220 My fellow citizens, would they pray God to bless me?

00:56:23.360 Because they believed that their boys died for something which vastly transcended the immediate objects of the war.

00:56:30.640 They believed, they believed, they believed.

00:56:32.720 Now, what he's saying is what he believes, but he's put it in the mouths of mothers who had lost their sons in France.

00:56:40.220 If you can't actually get someone else to say what you want to say that is more credible, at least you could do it through that transference message in the speech.

00:56:51.840 And, again, these are techniques that can be taught and practiced in a way that then inspires more participation.

00:57:00.800 People can relate to it, you know, but there's a lot of work to be done to do that.

00:57:05.260 Well, you wrote this entire book recently on ways to participate and ways to improve democracy.

00:57:10.260 Can you step us through that to a greater degree?

00:57:14.300 When you look at the democratic processes in Canada and perhaps in the West in general, what else do you see that needs to be improved and how?

00:57:23.760 Well, I would almost come back to some of the things I've said already.

00:57:27.180 Recruiting better people, and I know that's being pejorative, but recruiting better people who've got some other reason than self-interest to get into the political, a recruitment system, a scouting system.

00:57:40.340 How can we have a scouting system for the NHL and we can't have it for the Parliament of Canada, the legislation?

00:57:46.520 Recruiting people.

00:57:47.860 And you have to deal with their objections.

00:57:49.520 I've been involved in candidate recruitment my entire life, and the biggest single reason given now for not being involved is people, very good people, competent people, people make a contribution and say,

00:58:02.740 I will not subject myself and my family to the abuse that I'm going to get, particularly through the media and the social media.

00:58:09.500 So you have to address those types of questions.

00:58:11.680 And then I say, okay, you got recruitment, then training, preparation.

00:58:14.960 I have a list of 20 questions a lawmaker should ask.

00:58:20.040 And these are not, we're not talking like a lawyer about the law.

00:58:24.240 We're talking about a law, someone who makes the law is different than a lawyer.

00:58:28.140 And there's certain questions that got to be asked about a bill.

00:58:32.580 What's the story behind it?

00:58:33.860 You make a big point in your recent book about the importance of stories.

00:58:38.700 What's the story behind the, why is this here?

00:58:41.800 Should this Parliament even be considering this?

00:58:44.960 Does the bill state the purpose of the law you're trying to pass?

00:58:50.580 And does it state it in the bill, not in the preamble?

00:58:53.440 Because our courts have dismissed declarations of purpose that are in the preamble.

00:58:57.200 They can't dismiss it within the bill.

00:58:59.160 There's a whole bunch of, what's the social impact of this?

00:59:01.860 What's the economic impact?

00:59:03.200 What's the administrative cost of this?

00:59:04.840 There's about 20 questions you should ask about if you're going to be a lawmaker.

00:59:07.900 But that's not, that's not taught.

00:59:11.580 But so the recruitment, the training, and then a big emphasis on this communication aspect, the small d democat receiver oriented communicator, rather than the source oriented communicator.

00:59:22.860 These are all things that can be taught.

00:59:25.440 And then there's special subjects under this revitalizing democracy.

00:59:29.660 One that I raise is, how are you going to handle relations with the science community and the political community?

00:59:36.440 This is becoming a big thing.

00:59:37.780 In this COVID, every government claims that their policy is science-based.

00:59:43.300 And I've just written an op-ed, actually, suggesting that the scientists themselves should become the primary communicator in the public space of their science.

00:59:51.820 Do not surrender that to political actors, to bureaucratic actors, even if they have a science degree, or to media commentators exclusively.

00:59:59.680 Because they, even unintentionally, will have a biased interpretation.

01:00:04.140 They will use the science that supports for their preconceived notions, and they'll ignore the stuff that don't science.

01:00:09.860 But you've got to work on that.

01:00:11.220 How do we improve the relations between science and the political community?

01:00:14.920 And then the last thing I get into is, what can you say to faith-oriented people as to how to participate in the political arena?

01:00:23.080 And on that, I go back to the New Testament.

01:00:25.680 You know, the historians say that Jesus of Nazareth, the first, he only had three and a half years of public work.

01:00:35.160 The first year, he had this motley crew of fishermen and tax collectors and shepherds or whatever they were.

01:00:43.200 They didn't do anything except follow him around and see what he did and see what he said.

01:00:47.260 But about a year in, he decided he's going to send them out to do some public work in his name.

01:00:52.000 But there's this whole passage in Matthew where it gives an instruction.

01:00:55.400 And the key instruction was, be wise as serpents and gracious as doves, which are powerful analogies in the Jewish lexicon.

01:01:05.620 Wise as a serpent.

01:01:07.280 The serpent was the symbol of the devil.

01:01:09.280 Be as wise as the forces of evil.

01:01:12.440 And the dove was the symbol of the Spirit of God.

01:01:15.220 Be as gracious as the Spirit of God.

01:01:17.460 And so I say, if you're a believer, and this doesn't just apply to Christians, if you're a faith-oriented person participating in democratic politics, be wise in how you do it and be gracious.

01:01:29.640 And I always add, he did not say, be vicious as snakes and stupid as pigeons, which some of us of a faith background are capable of doing.

01:01:38.780 So these are all recruitment, training, special training on the science side, the religious side.

01:01:47.460 These are all things that could be done to, I think, to strengthen democracy.

01:01:53.840 Well, let's talk a little bit about the last detour that the conversation took.

01:01:59.820 And you've done a fair bit of work on navigating the faith-political interface.

01:02:05.240 Yeah, yeah.

01:02:06.720 Well, I think that, I think people of faith have major things they can contribute.

01:02:13.560 One is in this area of lawmaking.

01:02:15.540 If one wants to read a treatise on the attempt to achieve conflict resolution and peace and prosperity through the rule of law, you cannot read a more thorough book than the Hebrew scriptures, the Christian Old Testament.

01:02:34.640 Because what was that all about?

01:02:37.060 There was a proclamation of the law of God through Moses, the Ten Commandments.

01:02:42.380 You have a good description of that in non-religious language in that book, that last book of yours.

01:02:51.220 And then you have a 400-year experiment at trying to make people righteous by applying the rule of law, with drastic penalties proclaimed for breaking it, and enormous blessings promised for keeping it.

01:03:06.380 But what was the conclusion of the latter-day prophets?

01:03:11.100 That you couldn't make people righteous by law alone, unless it could be internalized, unless it was written, as Isaiah said this, or Zechariah or somebody, unless the law can be written on the tablets of the heart, it's no good just having it on tablets of stone or parchment or in statute books or the revised statutes of Canada.

01:03:30.120 Like, that's an enormous lesson.

01:03:32.480 The benefits of law and the rule of law, it's extreme importance, but it has limits.

01:03:38.320 And that's something that people of faith, particularly Christians or Jewish people that understand that, that's an enormous contribution you can make.

01:03:45.320 And particularly in these parliaments and legislations today, where you've got people that think you can solve every problem by some action of government or some law of government, that that would be a contribution that they could make.

01:03:56.660 Well, the law has to reflect the spirit of the people that it serves.

01:04:01.520 Otherwise, it would be just an imposition from outside, right?

01:04:04.200 So it has to be part of this conversation that we've been talking about continually.

01:04:08.580 Yeah.

01:04:09.940 And then if you go to the New Testament, okay, so you can't reconcile people to God or to each other by the rule of law alone.

01:04:17.440 So what do you got?

01:04:18.280 The New Testament, you've got a different approach, self-sacrificial mediation.

01:04:23.040 A mediator, for one thing, who incorporates both sides of the problem and the vertical of engineering, he's God and he's man.

01:04:31.920 This is the very opposite of a judicial mediator who is distant, who has to keep himself distant from the parties.

01:04:38.300 No, this mediator integrates both of them.

01:04:41.240 He's on both sides.

01:04:41.940 So how do you understand that, both religiously and politically?

01:04:45.480 Well, I can give you a sort of a hubris example of more from my consulting practice.

01:04:52.640 One of the things that I got involved in trying to reconcile some conflicts between oil companies and aboriginal groups.

01:05:02.580 Gulf Oil had a heavy oil.

01:05:05.600 This was a long time ago, so my details may be as correct as they should be, but they had a heavy oil pilot plant at Wabascaw, north of Lesser Slave Lakes, south and east of Fairview, where you came from.

01:05:21.160 And there was a big aboriginal band there, the Big Stone Band, and there was going to be tensions between the oil company and the aboriginals.

01:05:28.560 And so the guy in charge of the project, his name was Norm.

01:05:31.560 He was a principal guy who I really admired, except he used to swear all the time, and his favorite epitaph was Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ.

01:05:40.700 I think he knew that bothered me.

01:05:43.080 But anyway, one day Norm says, we've got to hire somebody to help deal with this potential coming conflict between us and the Big Stone Band.

01:05:52.960 And he said, I want suggestions from all of you.

01:05:55.500 I was a consultant, and there was others there.

01:05:57.600 And so a few weeks later, he said, well, I've got suggestions back.

01:06:02.980 The legal people want a legal beagle because they say this is going to get into court, and they want somebody that can handle the legal aspects of the treaty relationship and the contract with the band and everything else.

01:06:13.860 They want a legal beagle.

01:06:15.400 He says, the PR people want a pretty face that can explain all this on television and smooth it all over.

01:06:20.460 And he says, and Manning here, because I had recommended a Métis guy that I knew in the community who hunted and fished with the Big Stone boys, but who'd also done contract work and was well respected by golf.

01:06:32.360 I recommended an in-between guy who incorporated both sides of the question.

01:06:39.460 And so Norm says, and Manning here wants me to hire Jesus Christ.

01:06:43.780 And then he says, okay, so what we're going to do, we're going to take all the candidates down to the Athabasca River, the first one that could walk across the top.

01:06:52.180 But, you know, normally what I was getting at, yes, you can get a defender on one side or the other from a PR standpoint or legal standpoint, or you can try to find a mediator who actually internalizes this conflict.

01:07:07.800 And I think that person can play that reconciliation role better than the person from one side or the other.

01:07:13.600 That's maybe not the best illustration.

01:07:15.080 And what do you mean by internalizing the conflict?

01:07:17.420 Well, in effect, the example of Jesus of Nazareth, like he took upon himself the sins of the people and sacrificed himself in order to satisfy the demands of the other party.

01:07:33.340 And I think in this third party reconciliation, maybe by a mediator, and the difficulty in it is that the mediator pays the price of the reconciliation, pays a big portion of the price of the reconciliation.

01:07:45.960 He'll be misunderstood by both sides, and they'll both come after him.

01:07:51.420 And maybe that's why it's not such an attractive profession.

01:07:56.280 But I think that's what practicing what Jesus of Nazareth was talking about, the self-sacrificial mediator.

01:08:02.060 Can you sacrifice your own interests in order to bring these two parties together?

01:08:05.940 And that's in the name of a higher virtue, in the name of peace or something like that?

01:08:10.400 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of ending the conflict.

01:08:14.160 And in that book, I also get into issue campaigns.

01:08:18.820 I'm a great believer in issue campaigns.

01:08:20.300 When we talk about training people for political involvement, one is through formal training and courses and everything else.

01:08:26.660 The other is participating in an issue campaign, like reform.

01:08:32.400 The year before reform elected its 52 members to the Canadian Parliament, that 1993, there was this referendum campaign on the Charlottetown Constitutional Accord, where this constitutional accord was put together and Canadians were to vote on yes or no, do you want this?

01:08:48.520 And so there's a referendum campaign.

01:08:51.620 So now we got all involved in that, because it involves all the same things as an election campaign virtually.

01:08:58.300 You've got to give speeches.

01:08:59.440 You've got to prepare material.

01:09:00.680 You've got to knock on doors.

01:09:02.080 You've got to distribute material.

01:09:03.420 You've got to handle criticism and opposition.

01:09:05.520 It's almost the same as an election campaign.

01:09:08.280 And that, for us, was a training ground for the 1993 election.

01:09:12.440 We trained constituency workers.

01:09:14.040 We trained candidates.

01:09:15.280 We trained spokespersons by participating in that issue campaign.

01:09:19.760 And coming back to the faith political influence, if one wants to study issue campaigns, the classic issue campaign in the British parliamentary tradition is Wilberforce's anti-slavery campaign.

01:09:32.760 It is an absolute classic.

01:09:34.660 Every mistake that could be made was made.

01:09:37.360 Every innovation in trying to win a campaign was made in that case.

01:09:43.420 And it was very much motivated by people with a Christian perspective.

01:09:48.800 So it's very instructive to faith-oriented people.

01:09:52.440 Even the way Wilberforce introduced the first motion in the British House of Commons that it considered this issue.

01:10:02.600 The moralists at that time, like the moralists today, they wanted him to ride into the House of Commons on a white charger and just denounce slavery as an abomination from hell.

01:10:14.500 And anybody connected with it ought to have their head chopped up.

01:10:17.480 That's what the moralists want to do.

01:10:18.940 Let's place this historically.

01:10:20.440 So this is taking place in Great Britain at what point?

01:10:23.040 The late 1700s.

01:10:25.220 Yeah, well, this is a very germane discussion because there's so much discussion right now about the idea of slavery being built into the United States, for example.

01:10:32.480 Yeah.

01:10:32.900 So this is a great historical story.

01:10:35.940 Oh, yeah.

01:10:36.360 And it's an alternative.

01:10:37.640 The Americans, you know, our U.S. friends know Americans tried for 30 years by every other conceivable way to somehow come to grips with the slavery issue.

01:10:47.460 But it didn't work and ended up in war, where in Britain they managed to do that.

01:10:52.540 And while Wilberforce was told and tempted to ride into the White House, the horse, the Parliament on a white horse.

01:11:00.200 So he was supposed to be like wielding the sword of moral righteousness as a what?

01:11:05.400 As a member of Parliament.

01:11:07.060 A shining exemplar or something like that.

01:11:08.800 But his friend Pitt, William Pitt, the younger, was the prime minister then.

01:11:13.120 The guy became prime minister at age 24, 26.

01:11:15.840 Right, right.

01:11:16.080 And Pitt was his friend.

01:11:19.380 And Pitt, I think, told, I don't know if I can prove this from the records, but I think Pitt told him, you do that and this issue will not be discussed in this house for another 20 years.

01:11:30.600 You take that, you'll offend.

01:11:31.960 So why was he able to say that?

01:11:35.700 Why did he know that that wouldn't work, do you think?

01:11:37.820 Because of offending everyone around the...

01:11:39.860 Well, there were so many British economic interests tied to slavery that if you come in crusading like that,

01:11:45.600 you're not going to get anywhere, particularly in the House of Lords, which was even more prominent then than the House of Commons.

01:11:51.280 So Wilberforce...

01:11:51.900 So was the danger there the exhibition of moral superiority, do you think?

01:11:56.600 No, I think it was a threat to economic interests that would just shut it down.

01:12:01.320 But Wilberforce responded by this resolution.

01:12:04.660 And you can read it.

01:12:05.460 I've got it in my book somewhere.

01:12:08.280 That this House give consideration to the circumstances surrounding the slave trade.

01:12:16.960 He didn't even go to slavery itself.

01:12:19.700 He went to the slave trade, something less.

01:12:21.460 And that just that the House give consideration to the circumstances.

01:12:25.960 And you can see his moral compatriots and what a mealy-mouthed resolution is that.

01:12:32.740 But he got it passed.

01:12:34.640 He got it passed.

01:12:35.600 The House said, I don't like this stuff, but I guess it can't do any harm.

01:12:39.600 And that incremental way.

01:12:41.860 And then, of course, there was a 50-year campaign.

01:12:44.100 But in the end of the day, 850,000 enslaved people throughout the British Empire were declared free.

01:12:51.720 And it's a classic case in the issue campaign with a moral, with a very moral dimension to it.

01:13:00.360 Right.

01:13:00.820 Well, and you prefaced that story with the idea of the mediator who takes the battle inside himself in some sense.

01:13:08.840 And so how do you see that playing out in the case of Wilberforce?

01:13:11.920 The claim, and this is obviously not a claim that's limited to you, that it was Wilberforce's Christianity that influenced his opposition to slavery.

01:13:22.000 And how do you understand that opposition as well and its relationship with Christianity?

01:13:27.140 Well, I say the opposition to this, I think, was coming mainly from economic interest.

01:13:32.840 And then from political people who said, if I'm on that side, I'm going to lose my seat the next time around.

01:13:38.600 So you had that motivation.

01:13:40.360 But Wilberforce took an enormous amount of abuse for all this.

01:13:46.080 Like, he tried to take this sort of moderate view.

01:13:48.340 And so he was lambasted by the zealots on his own side.

01:13:54.040 And then he, because what he's proposing is something that's offensive to the more ruling class economically and politically,

01:14:01.260 he offends them and he's denounced on both sides.

01:14:08.440 But he takes that on himself.

01:14:09.980 That's what's going to happen if you're this mediator in between.

01:14:15.560 They lost motion after motion.

01:14:17.700 They lost one motion by six or eight votes because some of the members went off to have a drinking party or something.

01:14:25.540 And just a discouragement.

01:14:27.580 But they managed to triumph in the end.

01:14:29.960 And I think there's a model in that campaign as to how to conduct issue campaigns, particularly on moral and ethical issues.

01:14:36.380 And particularly from a faith perspective, if that's one's perspective.

01:14:40.140 And so, okay, so let's focus again on this, on the motivation that Wilberforce had as a consequence of his belief.

01:14:48.760 Like, what was it that inspired him to work for that length of time and under those conditions against slavery?

01:14:56.700 What was the central belief, do you think, that he was trying to put forward?

01:15:00.100 He regarded it as morally wrong, but it was an established part of society at that point.

01:15:04.720 And, of course, slavery has existed in many forms for virtually forever.

01:15:09.600 So what was the inspiring idea that enabled him to do that and enabled it to work?

01:15:15.880 Well, he seemed to be very much motivated by suffering, any evidence of suffering, not just slavery.

01:15:21.320 Like, he founded another society for dealing with poverty, another society for dealing with cruelty to animals.

01:15:28.820 The guy seemed to be very touched and motivated by any instance of slavery, of suffering.

01:15:36.120 And, of course, slavery was a great example of it.

01:15:40.300 And then I think from his Christian perspective, he was convinced there was such a—evil was a reality.

01:15:46.000 There is such a thing as evil, and it has to be combated, and it can become institutionalized.

01:15:51.940 And I think his conception of evil on the negative side and his desire to alleviate suffering on the positive side, the two of those seem to combine to motivate him.

01:16:04.580 Well, it seems to me as well that in Christianity—I don't think it's limited necessarily to Christianity, but you see it very well developed in Christianity—is the idea that every human being has something about them that's of eternal and transcendent value.

01:16:18.280 And the political systems, economic systems, any other system has to take that into account when it's operating.

01:16:25.580 Otherwise, that's transgressing against something that's of fundamental and primary importance.

01:16:31.420 That's a very—it's a remarkable idea.

01:16:34.060 Yeah.

01:16:35.060 But you pay a price for trying to go down that route, you know, and maybe that's why it's—not many take it.

01:16:44.040 So you met with a very small number of people to begin with when you were—when you had decided to do whatever it was necessary to produce a political party.

01:16:56.240 Had you planned, in fact, on producing a party? Did that emerge across time?

01:17:00.060 No, no.

01:17:00.360 At this first meeting, there were five people at it.

01:17:02.980 One was Dr. David Elton, who was the head of the Canada West Foundation, which did work on Western issues.

01:17:13.300 But David was also a pollster.

01:17:15.620 And David said, look, as a pollster, I can't tell you that there is a market for a new party.

01:17:22.340 In fact, what I can tell you is there's no apparent—there's no apparent market for a new party.

01:17:30.040 He was sympathetic to what we were doing, but that was his contribution.

01:17:35.380 Jim Gray was, at that meeting, a very prominent oil person who was opposed to creating a new party because he knew the free trade issue was coming up, being promoted by the Maloney government.

01:17:50.900 He was afraid that any new initiative in the West would split the free trade vote, and he was very much in favor of free trade, as was I.

01:17:57.320 So he had that worry.

01:18:00.040 Ted Byfield, who was the head of the Alberta Report—Ted was sick that day and was there in spirit, but Ted was all for doing whatever you had to do to get attention and get these issues addressed.

01:18:14.040 And there were two oil patch lawyers there, too, who basically said, well, whatever you think we should do, we should do.

01:18:24.240 So anyway, the group couldn't agree on a course of action other than, why don't we have a small conference somewhere out of Alberta, actually, in Vancouver, so it's not just an Alberta thing, and put the options to the people we can get there.

01:18:37.200 Do we work within a new party?

01:18:39.900 Do we create a new advocacy pressure group of some kind?

01:18:44.200 If we work within a party, what party?

01:18:47.260 And what about this third-party option, which is part of the Western tradition?

01:18:51.360 And what were the issues that were driving them and you at the time, the primary issues?

01:18:56.420 Well, the angst in the oil patch about the national energy program that's confiscated $100 billion worth of wealth from the Western provinces.

01:19:06.840 The CF-18 issue, people won't remember what that was, but there was a maintenance contract that was won by Bristol Aircraft in Winnipeg,

01:19:15.220 and it was taken away from them despite the fact that they were the lowest bidder and best prepared to do it and given to a Montreal firm.

01:19:22.520 There was all these irritants.

01:19:24.280 And then there was approaching a $50 billion deficit to which this is under a Conservative government.

01:19:32.500 This is something that fiscal Conservatives were concerned about.

01:19:35.440 And then the West perennial complaints about the Senate, our Senate, unelected, unaccountable, ineffective, no adequate representation from Western Canada.

01:19:46.900 This was all boiling around there.

01:19:49.100 And the creation of separatist parties were being created in Western Canada, separatists, elected a member to the Alberta legislature.

01:19:55.840 So all of this is boiling around, just creating unrest.

01:19:58.340 So the only conclusion we could come from this meeting is let's have another meeting, very Canadian.

01:20:02.820 And so we had this conference in Vancouver, and people made the arguments for the difference.

01:20:09.240 I actually wrote to Moroni, the prime minister at the time, and said, look, this Western alienation is going to get out of hand.

01:20:15.860 It's going to cost you politically.

01:20:17.460 Why don't you send your best guy to argue that the Federal Conservative Party is still the best vehicle for addressing these discontents?

01:20:24.460 And I even suggested your best guy to do that would be Don Mazinkowski, who's his finance minister.

01:20:30.160 He's from Alberta, very respected.

01:20:32.420 And then they're very respected by myself and most of the rest of it.

01:20:35.920 And Moroni wrote back and said, I will not send Mazinkowski or anybody.

01:20:41.900 You guys have already decided you're going to create a new party, which wasn't true.

01:20:46.520 I didn't know what was going to happen.

01:20:49.420 And he said, not only will I not send Mazinkowski, I will forbid any of my members, including my Western members, from attending any such meeting, which was precisely the wrong thing to do.

01:21:00.060 Anyway, so we had this conference in Vancouver, and somebody argued for working within the existing party.

01:21:06.800 Somebody argued for creating a pressure group or advocacy group.

01:21:11.500 And there was a couple of other options, and I made the speech in favor of the West has created new parties to do this, what we want to do, and they could do it again.

01:21:20.220 And they took a vote, and the new party option won.

01:21:23.600 And they passed a resolution to have a founding convention in Winnipeg a short time after, and that's how it got off the ground.

01:21:29.900 So what made you convinced that there was enough discontent, say, in the West, that this was the right time to act?

01:21:36.380 Well, because I've been waiting around for 20 years watching all this.

01:21:40.080 And I used a consulting firm to chase political issues and keep track of things, do polling and everything else.

01:21:48.280 And when I was in university, I started out in physics, and then I couldn't handle the math, so I went into economics, where you can make the math work by changing it.

01:21:59.840 So, but Joe, the real political actors then, talk about upstream, Joe Clark was the leader of the progressive conservative club on campus.

01:22:11.960 Jim Coutts, who became the principal secretary to Pierre Tudor, was the liberal leader.

01:22:16.440 Grant Notley, who became the leader of the NDP in Alberta, was the leader of the NDP on campus.

01:22:23.160 And Joe used to try to convince me, Joe was committed to the conservatives, and he wouldn't say the conservatives were perfect or anything, but he was concerned, I'm going to try to make them better and all the rest.

01:22:33.020 And he tried to persuade me to, you ought to throw in your lot with us.

01:22:36.760 And I said, no, I think I'll wait.

01:22:39.800 I think the West, this is way back, I think the West is going to produce something new one of these days.

01:22:45.080 And I think I'll wait around for that.

01:22:47.560 Now, this, it took 20 years for that to happen, but I kind of had that feeling, and partly from my study of the, of the Western political tradition and our own family's tradition.

01:23:00.260 My father was part of the last wave, the Depression Party, creation of political parties.

01:23:05.760 So I just had this feeling that it was going to, the West was going to produce a new party, and then by the late 1980s, it was the time it was right.

01:23:12.520 Now, the thought that derives from this, it's hard to, reform was conceptualized as being right wing, but there were polls taken with Canadians of, are you right wing or left wing?

01:23:26.620 And they're taken today, only maybe 13 to 15% ever say that they're right wing, and only 12% say they're left wing in any kind of extreme sense.

01:23:37.720 They all say they're moderate, you know, why did the Canadian cross the road to get to the middle?

01:23:44.260 So, and reform, I mean, while it was conservative, it was advocating change, which is often seen as incompatible with conservatism.

01:23:52.440 We wanted to balance the budget, which was different than what had been done.

01:23:56.540 We wanted to reform the Senate.

01:23:59.280 We wanted freer votes in the parliament.

01:24:01.280 These were all political innovations that were hardly conservative in a sort of a traditional sense.

01:24:08.820 But since then, I keep thinking on how can you strengthen the conservative positions, conservative contributions to a better Canada and a better democracy.

01:24:18.460 And there's a more up-to-date list on that.

01:24:22.820 One of the things I think conservatives have to do is distinguish between the conservative party and the conservative movement.

01:24:31.560 I use, in the book, I use this triangle saying the party's at the top, it's the one that gets elected to the legislation in the parliament.

01:24:39.160 But underneath it are the think tanks and generators of intellectual capital.

01:24:43.680 The political parties generate very little intellectual capital themselves.

01:24:46.920 They've got no time, they've got no inclination.

01:24:48.940 Somebody else has to do it.

01:24:50.000 Well, the conservative think tanks can do that, but they've got to be more vigorous and better funded, et cetera.

01:24:54.760 There's an advocacy group.

01:24:55.940 The party can only crusade on certain things, but there's advocacy groups that can crusade on, you know,

01:25:01.640 if you want to get a mixed public and private health care system, somebody else got a crusade on that.

01:25:09.160 The parties will pick it up if it gets enough public support.

01:25:12.000 So there's all this infrastructure underneath the think tanks, advocacy groups, communicators, fundraisers, recruiters, trainers, and all that.

01:25:20.960 And I argue that the stronger that movement is, the stronger, the better the party will perform.

01:25:28.220 And so a lot of my subsequent work has been on trying to strengthen the movement.

01:25:31.840 Another concept that introduces is political realignment, that from time to time, conservatives have to fundamentally shift in some way.

01:25:42.260 And that this is not incompatible with being conservative.

01:25:46.140 Edmund Burke used to talk about this.

01:25:48.840 I mean, he's considered an arch-conservative theorist in many respects.

01:25:54.620 But he said conservative and change have to coexist because the conditions change.

01:26:00.780 And so in order to conserve the principle, you have to change.

01:26:03.740 And I used to illustrate this.

01:26:05.240 I did this community development work in north-central Alberta.

01:26:09.280 And on an old road east of the Slave Lake, there used to be a sign, a great big heavy post with a crossboard on it,

01:26:19.480 with one word on it, saw ridge, and an arrow pointing west.

01:26:23.820 It was pointing towards the town of Saw Ridge.

01:26:26.620 And that sign never changed its message.

01:26:29.160 It never changed its direction.

01:26:30.340 It never changed its position, no matter how the wind blew or how much snow.

01:26:35.040 But if you followed the directions on that sign, you would never get to the town of Saw Ridge.

01:26:38.800 Why was that?

01:26:39.580 Because the town changed its name.

01:26:42.620 It changed its location after a flood in the 1930s.

01:26:45.640 The roads to get there were changed to half a dozen times.

01:26:48.840 And so the very conservatism of that sign, it's unmoving in its commitment.

01:26:53.720 We're always saying the same thing.

01:26:54.940 We're always putting an error rather than pointing to the truth.

01:27:01.180 And so this need for fundamentally realigning conservatives with the times has become a –

01:27:07.520 and the way we advocated reform was a form of that, trying to get that realignment, change the old progressive –

01:27:12.980 So what do you see as the central tenets of an updated conservatism?

01:27:18.740 And what sort of attraction do you think they might have or could have for people who are curious about the political endeavor, philosophical endeavor, etc.?

01:27:28.340 Distinguish that from the liberals or the progressives.

01:27:31.020 Well, I think that's a very important point.

01:27:33.840 I think there's been – just trying to be a pale imitation of the liberals or NDP does not get you anywhere.

01:27:42.020 I think the challenge is to present distinctive alternatives.

01:27:46.580 And the areas that I –

01:27:47.020 I think the conservatives in the U.S. are struggling with that at the moment, too, especially the moderate conservatives.

01:27:52.120 You know, the people who occupy that huge majority that you described that are not committed to the left or the right.

01:27:58.140 There's a number of things going to be done.

01:27:59.380 And one is – I know this is getting repetitive – one is to harness some of these populist forces rather than oppose them or distance them from them.

01:28:08.140 And if you want an example of that, Boris Johnson in Britain, the Conservative Party has internalized that Brexit philosophy, which is a bottom-up populist thing.

01:28:19.980 Instead of opposing it, they've become the champion of it.

01:28:23.360 So figure out what some of these roots of the current populism, particularly in the West, this Western alienation, and address it rather than distance yourself from it or say, we don't want to deal with that.

01:28:33.740 That's one thing that can be done.

01:28:35.000 A second thing is, I think, to refresh conservative language.

01:28:40.660 Even on this balancing budgets and fiscal things, conservatives said the same things over and over and over again in the old languages.

01:28:48.060 You need to refresh the – there's other ways of saying balancing the budget than saying we're going to slash spending.

01:28:54.000 We're going to make more productive use of the dollar of the taxpayer, but find some way to refresh your language.

01:29:02.400 Adopt a green conservatism.

01:29:04.440 I think conservatives have to get – I've been slow to get onto the environmental issues, but offer a distinction from what the liberals and the greens and the socialists are.

01:29:14.640 Mainly use market mechanisms to address environmental conservation as distinct from just nothing but government regulation on top of government regulation.

01:29:25.060 I think there's things that can be done there.

01:29:28.880 There's additional, as I mentioned, with respect to getting young people.

01:29:35.160 Don't talk to young people in terms of the old left, right, center spectrum, but adopt some of the conceptual frameworks.

01:29:43.620 Your language, adopt conceptual frameworks that are more in the heads of those younger people.

01:29:49.860 Offering a different approach to poverty.

01:29:52.280 The other side has one standard approach to dealing with poverty, income redistribution through progressive taxation.

01:30:01.160 That's basically the approach to poverty by the liberals, the socialists, and even the greens.

01:30:07.060 And conservatives can offer an alternative, which is basically a better distribution of the tools of wealth creation, which conservatives know a lot about.

01:30:16.400 Access to capital, micro capital, access to technology, access to markets that ordinary people don't have before.

01:30:23.700 And I spent 20 years trying to do this in that north-central Alberta area, and I know that approach can work.

01:30:30.620 We, that area of Alberta was, my father did some studies last year asking why were certain areas of Alberta not prospering the way that most of the rest of the province was.

01:30:44.800 And one of the areas was that big central, north-central area between Fort McMurray and the oil sands and the Peace River country on the west.

01:30:52.680 And one day we had this little consulting firm, a small group of guys from Slave Lake, the town of Slave Lake, came in and said,

01:31:00.700 we want to establish a community development company with two objectives.

01:31:05.660 One is it's got to earn a return on the capital that's invested, so it's a capitalist institution.

01:31:10.880 But we want to undertake projects that have got social benefit to this community.

01:31:15.900 In particular, we need rental housing for some of the workers that are coming in, and there's absolutely nothing here.

01:31:20.900 We want dual, what would be called a social enterprise today was what they were talking about.

01:31:25.780 And they asked us to, I'd given speeches on this, so they came to us, and we agreed to help.

01:31:31.740 And so we created this company called Slave Lake Developments Limited.

01:31:34.220 We sold shares, common shares, at a dollar a share.

01:31:37.740 It took 18 months to raise $100,000.

01:31:41.120 These people have never owned a share in anything.

01:31:44.220 The Securities Commission said, why on earth would you be using this mechanism to raise $100,000?

01:31:49.780 We said, this is an education exercise as much as it is a capital-raising exercise.

01:31:55.420 And so we managed to get some money.

01:31:58.720 And then we established contacts between these people with some of the oil companies that were moving into the area that they didn't have.

01:32:05.560 Not contacts with the field people, contacts with the head offices in Calgary.

01:32:10.120 We had the connections there, so we gave them contacts.

01:32:13.060 All of this is distributing tools of wealth creation.

01:32:17.120 We talked.

01:32:18.300 I know I'm rambling on, but one day in our little consulting firm, we got a phone call.

01:32:22.800 I got a phone call from Bill Twaits, the president of Imperial Oil, who rarely, well, you knew my dad.

01:32:29.100 I think that's why I called the office.

01:32:31.260 Anyway, he says, I hear you.

01:32:32.880 My Calgary people say you're trying to get a social investment out of Imperial Oil.

01:32:37.580 He says, we don't have a social investment policy.

01:32:41.300 What are you trying to do?

01:32:42.200 Well, I explained to him.

01:32:43.600 Well, he says, this is a real estate project?

01:32:45.740 Go to our real estate guy.

01:32:46.840 I said, no, because I know what return your real estate guy wants, and this project will give it.

01:32:51.080 He said, well, he says, if it's a charity thing, go to our charity guy.

01:32:53.980 I said, no, we've been telling these people there's another way to raise money than going around with your hand out to the government or to a donor.

01:33:00.620 No, we want investment from you.

01:33:02.740 You're going to get a 6% return on it, but there's going to be a social benefit, which will actually benefit you, too, because some of your workers will have a place.

01:33:10.320 So Twait says, well, we don't have a policy on that.

01:33:12.980 I'll have to take it to the board, he says.

01:33:15.360 And he's pulling my leg.

01:33:17.120 I can just imagine the board of Imperial Oil considering a $25,000 investment in slavery.

01:33:24.320 So anyway, the guy calls back another two weeks.

01:33:26.700 He says, my people.

01:33:27.660 I didn't know he'd ever took it to the board.

01:33:29.600 He says, my people say to give you the money.

01:33:31.660 He says, and I know you're going to run around Calgary saying you got a social investment out of Imperial Oil, but I want you to know what his voice is.

01:33:38.000 As far as I'm concerned, it's charity, and he slammed the thing down.

01:33:42.440 Anyway, we got this project going.

01:33:44.160 It got going.

01:33:45.460 The project got built.

01:33:48.040 The community company earned enough to be able to pay off the oil company.

01:33:52.220 We put on a little dinner in Calgary for the oil companies.

01:33:55.860 It was Imperial Mobile Rainbow Pipeline.

01:33:58.540 And we put to thank him, and we took pictures.

01:34:03.160 Here's your original $25,000 getting back.

01:34:06.580 Here's your 6% dividend.

01:34:08.780 We took pictures.

01:34:10.280 Walt Dingell was the Imperial guy, and we sent these to Twait, and said, here's your getting your money back.

01:34:15.200 Here's your dividend.

01:34:16.480 And I added, and it ain't charity.

01:34:19.100 And then the ironic thing, at the end of this dinner, Ed Braden, who is the mobile representative, came to me and says, this is all very nice, but it creates a bit of a problem for us.

01:34:28.780 We all treated it as a charity and wrote it off.

01:34:32.040 So the accountants won't know what to do with these checks.

01:34:35.940 So is there some charitable project up there that you can give it back to?

01:34:40.940 And so the money went around twice.

01:34:42.420 But to make a long story short, what we did was just give them the tools of wealth creation and talk to the provincial government.

01:34:49.060 Instead of building a little provincial building in every town in the province, in this case, why don't you give them a 20-year lease for 40,000 square feet that they can take to a financial company and get a mortgage, the first big commercial mortgage in the town?

01:35:02.620 Like, why don't you do that?

01:35:04.040 And we got that.

01:35:05.600 And anyway, I was president of the company for a number of years to get it off the ground.

01:35:09.080 And I had to leave when we got into the political business.

01:35:11.080 And they ended up getting professional management.

01:35:14.220 And they branched out from Slave Lake.

01:35:15.900 They didn't want all their eggs in one basket.

01:35:17.520 They got a whole bunch of projects.

01:35:19.500 40, 45 years later, whatever, they still had these basic shareholders.

01:35:23.680 Nobody could own more than 10% of the company.

01:35:25.680 They had these 300 local shareholders.

01:35:28.260 They sold the company for $55 million and distributed that among those shareholders.

01:35:34.540 Now, that's a fair amount of money.

01:35:36.180 And that is addressing a poverty-stricken area.

01:35:40.480 But by that time, it wasn't poverty-stricken.

01:35:43.660 But it was accomplished by the distribution, better distribution, the tools of wealth creation as distinct from just handing them money from a pot that's been raised through progressive taxation.

01:35:56.680 And why can't conservatives champion that approach to poverty alleviation as a distinctive of the conservative movement?

01:36:06.720 And so I've got a whole list of things like that that I think conservatives could do that would advance the cause and address the problems facing the country.

01:36:16.140 So I want to ask you a little bit more about the development of the party.

01:36:18.740 You talked about the founding convention.

01:36:20.420 Let's go from there.

01:36:21.180 And then I want to ask you about your view of Canada currently.

01:36:24.320 Well, yeah, then to build the party, like, we didn't have a lot of money.

01:36:31.240 And so we had to do it through a lot of public meetings.

01:36:38.520 Eventually, after I got to Ottawa, because we're still building the party after that, the idea was to create a national party, not just a Western party.

01:36:46.900 And the constitution of the party also had a sunset clause in it, that it would come to an end in 10 years.

01:36:54.120 And I wanted that because I knew this political realignment principle that after 10 years, however we'd set it up in the beginning, was going to have to change fundamentally.

01:37:03.580 And so there was that sunset clause.

01:37:05.400 And that's what allowed us to create the Canadian alliance as the next iteration of the thing, because the party had to decide whether to continue in its current form, do something else.

01:37:13.740 But by the time we got to Ottawa, we were still trying to promote as a national party, my schedule was 50 days a year at home in Calgary, 100 days a year in Ottawa, and 200 days on the road for year after year after year after year.

01:37:28.000 And we had some very good staff people and people on our board that made huge sacrifices in order to do that.

01:37:37.620 But I mean, it's a big country, crusade from East Point of Newfoundland to Tolfino in BC, from Coutts, Alberta to the Yukon.

01:37:50.640 But it was basically done by grassroots organization public meetings.

01:37:57.180 And when, after you created the party, you entered the first election.

01:38:01.760 What were the, what were the consequences in the first election?

01:38:04.680 Well, the first election we ran in 19, the party was only formed in 1987.

01:38:08.200 So we, and then the next election came in 1988.

01:38:10.680 That was a free trade election.

01:38:12.780 And we ran 72 candidates.

01:38:14.640 None of them won.

01:38:16.000 We finished second in 11 or 12 seats.

01:38:20.500 And there was a real question.

01:38:21.900 It was like, is this worth carrying on?

01:38:23.720 We got some support, but not enough to elect anybody.

01:38:27.060 And then, well, a conservative member that had been elected in the riding of Beaver River in Alberta passed away.

01:38:37.580 The guy had cancer and didn't survive more than a couple of months after the election.

01:38:41.540 So there was a by-election.

01:38:43.240 And we had a candidate there, talk about a grassroots bottom-up party named Deborah Gray.

01:38:48.640 And she was a school teacher on the Frog Lake Reserve, which is one of the very depressed reserves in Alberta.

01:38:57.380 How she could contribute, what she contributed there is a miracle in itself.

01:39:02.620 And she was our candidate in the general election.

01:39:04.860 She finished second.

01:39:06.660 And then the question being, should I, as the leader, run in that by-election?

01:39:09.920 Because we would have a good chance of getting it.

01:39:11.440 People can take a chance in a by-election because it's not going to upset anything.

01:39:15.380 Or should she?

01:39:17.260 But she was very popular, very articulate.

01:39:21.140 And she was a small-D Democrat.

01:39:24.000 Deborah's a small-D Democrat.

01:39:25.560 Yes, she's conservative in that.

01:39:27.180 But her dominant philosophy is a small-D Democrat.

01:39:30.820 People's understanding.

01:39:32.260 People's representative.

01:39:33.720 And so Deborah contested the by-election.

01:39:36.580 And we won.

01:39:37.160 So now we got one seat in the Parliament of Canada represented by Deborah Gray.

01:39:41.280 And Stephen Harper, who was our policy chief, who we got Stephen, was – we had no money.

01:39:50.960 So I said, where are we going to get a policy chief?

01:39:52.460 We can't pay him anything.

01:39:53.440 But it occurred to me, graduate students at university.

01:39:56.380 They're exploitable.

01:39:57.940 So I called the Dr. Bob Mansell, who was an economist at the University of Calgary, whom I'd done work with.

01:40:03.120 I said, Bob, who's your smartest economics student, graduate student, that might be willing to go on a political adventure?

01:40:10.120 And he gave me one name, Stephen Harper.

01:40:12.060 So Stephen became our policy chief.

01:40:14.560 And then when Deborah won, Stephen went with her as her executive assistant, but as our main staff person in Ottawa.

01:40:23.700 And the thing got off the ground.

01:40:25.520 And she took an enormous amount of abuse.

01:40:28.020 And it makes me mad in retrospect, particularly to hear the Liberals talk about how they would champion women being involved in politics.

01:40:41.360 They did everything in their power to defeat Agnes Campbell McPhail, the first one member of her.

01:40:46.940 And they were as abusive to Deborah as you could possibly be.

01:40:50.800 If a conservative said things that they said to her about a liberal female cabinet minister, they'd be censored all over the cancel culture would come to the fore.

01:41:00.480 But there was and so Deborah put up with a lot of abuse.

01:41:03.580 We were on this fiscal responsibility thing.

01:41:05.860 She took a 10 percent cut in pay, which was unheard of in Ottawa.

01:41:11.500 In fact, the finance department said they didn't know how there was no way to do it.

01:41:17.740 So so that's how we got a foothold.

01:41:19.940 And then we kept building, building, building, building.

01:41:22.600 And then by the 93 election, we had a substantive organization enough to win the 52 seat.

01:41:31.200 Right.

01:41:31.340 And what happened to Mulroney's conservatives in that election?

01:41:34.040 Well, they were completely they were reduced to absolutely reduced to not nothing.

01:41:40.540 They were reduced to two seats.

01:41:42.000 It was the greatest defeat in between two new parties of the bloc in Quebec and reform alone.

01:41:50.280 We took 106 seats out of the of the 300 and some seats that were in the parliament at that time.

01:41:56.940 Of course, the liberals under Jean Chrétien formed the formed the government.

01:42:01.280 But the liberals only elected two members, Jean Charest and Elsie Wayne from New Brunswick.

01:42:08.500 And we used to kid that they didn't like this.

01:42:10.980 We said, you're the most valuable members of part of it because the conservatives spent $22 million on the campaign.

01:42:16.840 You're each worth $11 million.

01:42:19.740 They didn't like that.

01:42:21.280 But that's how it got off the ground.

01:42:22.960 And then we're constantly trying to do this coalition building like the.

01:42:27.720 So then I could tell we weren't going to go much further with reform.

01:42:32.280 So we created this conservative reform alliance.

01:42:36.240 And basically that was with the leftovers, so to speak, of the conservative party.

01:42:39.900 No, no.

01:42:40.340 This was basically with provincial allies, with the Klein conservatives in Alberta,

01:42:44.500 the Fillman conservatives in Manitoba and the Harris conservatives,

01:42:48.000 particularly Mike Harris was very helpful to us and the Harris conservatives in Ontario.

01:42:52.520 And that created the Canadian alliance.

01:42:56.020 And then, say, I lost the leader.

01:42:57.860 I kept pushing the envelope on all this stuff.

01:43:00.260 And, you know, I was losing.

01:43:01.640 There's always people who were opposed to these changes.

01:43:04.580 And by the time it got to the leadership of the alliance, and we'd been, you know, campaigning in the election,

01:43:08.980 campaigning for changes, constant campaigning.

01:43:12.360 And then the joke was that the operation was a success, but the doctor died.

01:43:16.320 And it was Stockwell Day became the leader of the alliance.

01:43:20.740 It didn't go too well for Stock.

01:43:22.820 And then Harper came back and became the leader of the alliance.

01:43:27.100 And he and Peter McKay, whom we talked to before, but Peter would never come in.

01:43:32.100 But they got together and managed to put together the new conservative party of Canada.

01:43:37.160 So it's from those very humble beginnings, one seat ended up with a majority conservative government in 2010.

01:43:45.080 Right.

01:43:45.600 And that was under Harper?

01:43:47.200 Under Harper.

01:43:47.940 Yeah.

01:43:48.320 Yeah.

01:43:48.460 And so what were the consequences of that for Canada, do you think?

01:43:53.020 What did that accomplish?

01:43:55.460 Well, you had to change the direction on a number of things.

01:43:59.880 Stephen Harper is basically an economist.

01:44:02.180 It's always been.

01:44:02.860 He has a better grasp of public finance and the economy than I would argue than anybody in that current federal cabinet.

01:44:10.200 He's had a fixation with it.

01:44:12.020 His master's thesis was on whether there was a connection between the bank rate and the election cycle.

01:44:18.460 Not many people would be interested in that subject.

01:44:21.080 But his question was, did the bank liberalize credit in an election year in order to kind of make grease the wheels a little bit for whoever was proposing what, you know, which is an interesting thesis.

01:44:33.560 But so he made a major effort to balance, keep the budget balance, because we got the budget balance under Gretchen.

01:44:41.420 There was enough pressure on the liberals that they finally had to come around to do that.

01:44:45.060 But Stephen got sidetracked or affected by the downturn in 2008, 2009.

01:44:57.220 I think I've got my years right.

01:44:59.520 So they got knocked off the budget balancing path for a while.

01:45:04.400 He negotiated a whole bunch of freer trade arrangements, not just with the United States, but a number of other countries.

01:45:09.740 He endeavored to change the equalization to be a little more favorable to the West.

01:45:14.620 He pushed Senate reform as far as you could push it until the Supreme Court says you cannot amend the constitutional references to the Senate without the approval of seven of the provinces with 60% of the population.

01:45:27.620 So he did a number of things.

01:45:30.020 And there's been complaints from conservatives about the Harper administration.

01:45:33.960 Why didn't you do more for the West?

01:45:36.420 And I went to lunch with Stephen one time and put that question to him.

01:45:42.000 And he responded in two ways.

01:45:43.980 He gave me this list.

01:45:44.940 Here's what we did do.

01:45:46.600 We don't get a lot of credit for it, but here's what we did do.

01:45:48.760 It was this list of items that I mentioned.

01:45:51.300 But secondly, he said there was not the pressure on us to do more for the West that one would have expected, given our Western roots.

01:45:58.800 These Western guys seemed to assume that because we were there, we would do it.

01:46:03.360 And he argued there was more pressure from, I think he had six or eight members from Quebec.

01:46:07.980 There was more pressure from them to do something for Quebec than there was from that big block of Western members who just kind of assumed it should be done.

01:46:16.240 So one of the lessons.

01:46:17.620 Yeah, well, it's necessary if you want something done often to put forward a fairly detailed plan and to keep up the agitation.

01:46:24.840 You can't just assume that things are going to go your way because it isn't obvious that people will even know what that means in detail.

01:46:30.940 Yes, and particularly if you don't have the numbers, because ultimately a large block of members from Ontario particularly, it's not that the parliament was dominated by Western representatives at that time.

01:46:43.460 So those were some of the accomplishments.

01:46:46.640 But now the future is can conservatism revitalize itself and offer a principled alternative to the current government?

01:46:55.580 And there'll be an election fairly soon, fairly soon.

01:46:59.020 Well, so let's talk about the current state of affairs.

01:47:01.840 So what have you, do you know Justin Trudeau?

01:47:06.540 No, not really, not personally.

01:47:08.600 And that's the thing you have to be careful about making judgments just from what you in the media.

01:47:14.140 Again, I keep going back to my father's teaching.

01:47:17.260 I came home one time vehemently denouncing a couple of politicians in Alberta.

01:47:24.500 And he says, how do you know they're that bad?

01:47:29.800 Well, I said, you know, I've seen what they've been saying.

01:47:32.180 I've read the stuff in the media.

01:47:33.620 They're a bunch of scoundrels.

01:47:34.860 Well, he said, oh, let's do a little experiment here.

01:47:38.120 I'll get a list of five politicians that you have an opinion on and write down your opinion on them, negative ones that you have negative opinions on.

01:47:50.140 And I'll arrange one way or another for you to meet them or at least be at a small meeting where they are, where you can maybe get a firsthand assessment as distinct from getting it from the media or whatever.

01:48:01.680 And so we did that.

01:48:03.080 And then they said, then I want you to come back and tell me if your impression is the same as it was before.

01:48:07.280 And we did.

01:48:08.760 And I came back with four out of the five.

01:48:11.700 I actually had a more positive impression after actually meeting them and seeing them than I did by just absorbing what I absorbed through the media and that.

01:48:22.280 Toby, you've got to be careful about making these judgments.

01:48:26.900 Yeah, well, it's very difficult to know when you're informed by media sources just how partial your information is because you don't have anything to counter it.

01:48:35.240 Yeah, yeah.

01:48:36.000 And the best, and none of us can actually go and say, I want a personal meeting with the prime minister, but there are ways of getting closer to people that are close to them, have watched them, have done things.

01:48:46.020 You know, there are ways to get closer than just to rely on media or partisan material.

01:48:51.220 But with respect to Justin Trudeau, I don't feel he's a prime minister in the real sense.

01:48:58.060 One of the things I worry about is virtual politics, politics being conducted in virtual space as distinct from real political democratic space.

01:49:06.620 And I get a feeling that Justin Trudeau is a former drama teacher playing the role of prime minister as distinct from being a prime minister.

01:49:16.420 I think we don't have a finance minister.

01:49:19.480 I think we have a virtual prime minister, a finance minister.

01:49:23.540 We have a well-meaning journalist, perhaps.

01:49:26.580 But playing the role of finance minister, nothing in her background would suggest a grasp of public finance or the economy or anything else.

01:49:37.560 And I worry about us getting into a virtual politics that is just not the real thing, that the country doesn't have a real prime minister, doesn't have a real finance minister.

01:49:48.760 And one of the analogies that has come home to me on this, you know, Sandra and I watch some of these medical shows on TV, you know, the good doctor, the resident, the Chicago med, there's a bunch of them.

01:50:01.080 And those actors are very, very good at playing the role of doctors and nurses.

01:50:06.460 I mean, they're charismatic.

01:50:08.480 They talk.

01:50:09.700 They show them in the operating room doing something with somebody's liver and putting it in a tray like you would think these are real doctors.

01:50:18.360 But they are.

01:50:19.440 They're actors playing the role very, very well.

01:50:22.960 But if you were ill and you've been through this, would you want one of them to actually operate on you?

01:50:28.680 Or would you want the real thing, even if the real thing, maybe she's not, that doctor's not charismatic or he's got a wart on his nose or there's something wrong, but he knows how to do the real thing.

01:50:40.940 And I think the country's in danger of being governed in this virtual space as distinct from the actual space.

01:50:50.620 So that's, I don't think of Justin Trudeau as a real prime minister.

01:50:55.040 The second thing is, I worry that he is guided by ideologies that have little or nothing to do with Canada.

01:51:03.440 This embracing of critical race theory is not a Canadian rooted theory or philosophy.

01:51:09.740 Well, he has stated publicly, as far as I understand, that Canada doesn't really have a culture.

01:51:15.840 Well, yeah, that may be.

01:51:17.560 And so, but he's importing these theories from, basically from the United States, the critical race theory, identity politics, wokeism, and cancel culture.

01:51:32.420 And particularly Western Canada does not see that as even Canadian.

01:51:38.460 Don't see it as Canadians.

01:51:39.500 Our prime minister guided by some philosophy, basically the fact that the reaction to Black Lives Matter, which is understandably the kind of issue it is in the United States.

01:51:50.240 But to just import that here, if you want to get off on racial discrimination, surely the emphasis here should have been on the Indian Act and the indigenous and aboriginal population.

01:52:01.600 So the fact that we have a virtual prime minister, not a real prime minister, and one guided by ideologies that, in my view, are not Canadian is reason enough for his replacement.

01:52:13.440 And I think the worry, I think there's backroom people in the liberal party that will concede, never in the public arena, that Justin Trudeau is not the sharpest knife in the political kitchen, and that Mark Carney has a far better grasp of all this stuff.

01:52:33.760 He's not reading off a script when he does it.

01:52:37.140 But if you're headed for liberal leadership under Mark Carney, then all these things, particularly this ideologically orientation, is liable to get deeper and worse rather than better.

01:52:51.820 A lot of Western Canadians can't understand why Trudeau just falls all over himself to be recognized in Washington and Beijing and the Davos Club,

01:52:59.800 and makes no effort to bolster his fortunes in Winnipeg or Regina or Edmonton or Calgary.

01:53:07.120 We know they're not as dramatic places as Washington and Beijing, but this is your own country, and you're the prime minister of that part of the country.

01:53:16.240 So what do you think it is on the conservative side that's not putting up a sufficient, let's say, offense or defense against this?

01:53:24.180 Or do you think the tide will turn in the next election?

01:53:26.660 It doesn't look like a foregone conclusion to me.

01:53:29.000 That comes back to what we've talked about before.

01:53:31.540 I think conservatism needs to be rejuvenated by some of these things we've talked about,

01:53:35.720 by a realignment, by adopting a realistic position on the environment,

01:53:41.600 by offering an alternative on the poverty question, on dealing with balance.

01:53:46.260 I think the conservatives could champion balance as a very major part of their position.

01:53:54.820 What's the balance between health protection and civil rights protection?

01:53:58.680 What's the balance between economy and the environment?

01:54:05.540 Balance used to be a fundamental political characteristic of Canadians.

01:54:10.320 That joke about why did the Canadians cross the road to get to the middle?

01:54:13.440 And not just a middle that's a meaningless compromise, but a substantive middle that you can stand on.

01:54:18.680 I think if the conservatives can do that sort of thing, they could offer a principled alternative to the liberals.

01:54:24.820 But at present, that's not developing.

01:54:27.460 Hopefully it might, from my standpoint, under Aaron Motul, but it's not developing yet.

01:54:32.740 And what the conservative federal party has to watch is it has to address this Western alienation.

01:54:37.260 And it's got a huge base in Western Canada, but it's got to.

01:54:41.360 Do you see any signs of that happening?

01:54:43.320 And it looks to me like the conservatives over recent years have struggled,

01:54:47.340 certainly on the charisma and of the leadership spectrum.

01:54:50.160 And that seems to be at least in part why Trudeau was able to make the inroads that he made.

01:54:55.560 I mean, maybe people believed it was time for a change as well because.

01:54:58.640 Yeah, nine years is often the lifespan.

01:55:03.360 Well, I think the jury is still out on Aaron Motul.

01:55:06.020 There's still opportunity, but time is getting short.

01:55:09.880 And as I say, I think there's a need for revitalizing conservatism at the federal level.

01:55:15.220 And I try and list all in that book.

01:55:17.840 I try and list some of those things that can be done.

01:55:19.580 But I don't know whether the country has to get into real, even deeper trouble than it is now.

01:55:31.920 I mean, it's in trouble.

01:55:32.740 It's in trouble on the economy.

01:55:34.300 It's in trouble on the international stage.

01:55:36.260 It's not expected whether things have to get worse before they can get better.

01:55:41.280 My father dealt with four federal administrations.

01:55:44.340 Mackenzie King, during the latter part of the Depression, the war, Louis Saint Laurent, John Diefenbaker, and Lester Pearson.

01:55:56.820 And he said the strongest federal cabinet he dealt with, and he didn't agree with everything he did by any stretch of imagination, was Mackenzie King's war cabinet.

01:56:06.920 When the country got into a war, or the prospect of a war, leaders could go to somebody, King could go to Saint Laurent, who was a high-powered constitutional lawyer in Quebec with no idea of getting into federal politics, and said, you have to count the countries.

01:56:23.560 C.D. Howe was a business guy who normally would not have stayed in politics the length of time that he did.

01:56:30.960 But Howe could go to business people and say, you are coming to Ottawa to help organize wartime production.

01:56:36.020 And when they asked, what are you going to pay me, he said, I'll pay you a dollar a year.

01:56:39.360 And they came, and they came.

01:56:41.700 And I sometimes wonder if things have to get to that point where you can go to some of these people that could make a much greater contribution than what we've got there now and say, look, your country is, I don't care what you're doing academically or business-wise, you've got to come.

01:56:58.380 You've got to run for public office and offer an alternative.

01:57:01.920 But it's a shame that you have to get to that.

01:57:06.580 So what do you think are the fundamental issues that face Canadians at the moment?

01:57:11.160 You say the country is in trouble in some ways.

01:57:14.760 Well, I think one is this national unity problem.

01:57:17.460 I don't think particularly central Canada understands the depth of this Western alienation.

01:57:21.920 Again.

01:57:22.300 Yeah, and if you ever had a dual separatist movement, Quebec moving in that direction and the West moving at the same time, you'd tear the country apart.

01:57:31.520 I don't think there's an appreciation by the Laurentian elites that that old model of Canada is not sufficient for the 21st century.

01:57:39.840 So that, and Canadians can never take national unity for granted.

01:57:43.020 Our country's too big and too diverse to just hope it's going to hang together.

01:57:47.000 So that, that's one issue.

01:57:49.000 The second is the fiscal issue.

01:57:50.620 These astronomical deficits and debts and no even recognition that this could be a problem.

01:57:59.400 When, when we were crusading against the unbalanced budget in the 1990s, the liberals didn't object, didn't oppose the ultimate objective.

01:58:11.340 So, yeah, eventually you've got to balance the budget, but you guys are going too fast or you're, you're doing it the wrong way or you're cutting it up.

01:58:17.140 But they didn't oppose the ultimate objective.

01:58:21.120 But today there's, it's not even stated as an objective.

01:58:23.980 They bought into this new monetary theory that you can overspend and print money.

01:58:29.040 And as long as it doesn't seem to register in terms of the immediate inflation, you can do it ad infinitum.

01:58:35.180 And so I think restoring the fiscal health of the country is going to be an enormous challenge.

01:58:40.040 And I don't know, whoever does that is going to face a terrible task because it can't be done as quickly as it should be or could be without causing enormous pain.

01:58:51.300 And then our, our relations with the rest of the world.

01:58:54.240 I think they've been, they've deteriorated under, to this almost pathetic desire to be recognized by the world elites and the Davos crowd, the Washington crowd and in Beijing, I think is a dangerous thing.

01:59:14.340 I think on the international stage, the big 21st century competition is between the state directed democracy as promoted by the communist party and government of China and citizen directed democracy as traditionally practiced in the West, but which is in a lot of trouble.

01:59:29.520 And state directed capitalism as, and they call it that, they call it capitalism, state directed capitalism versus market driven capitalism, Western version.

01:59:38.900 And I think the West needs strong ideological leadership on those two, on those two fronts.

01:59:46.360 And we're certainly not getting that from, from hardly any Western leader, let alone Justin Trudeau.

01:59:55.400 This, I don't know, I got off on the China thing, but I went to China several times.

02:00:00.680 I went to China once as the official leader of the opposition.

02:00:03.200 I got to know some of these people in the international liaison department of the communist party, which is the party's foreign affairs department that establishes relationships with political parties all over the world.

02:00:15.700 And, and, and these are the guys that meet you at the airport and they have the standard questions.

02:00:19.560 Is there somebody else, you know, it's all been planned out, but is there somebody else you'd like to see or some other place you want to go?

02:00:24.500 And so, and so I knew one of these fellows well enough to pull his leg.

02:00:28.340 So I said, yes, I would like to meet my equivalent.

02:00:30.800 I would like to meet the leader of the official opposition in China.

02:00:34.740 So he goes away and huddles with his officials and comes back and says, we think if there is such a guy, he's in jail or he should be.

02:00:43.620 But, but then he got serious.

02:00:44.700 He said, the closest thing to you is that Martin Lee in Hong Kong, who is the leader of the democratic faction in, in Hong Kong.

02:00:52.380 But on all my trips there, everyone from the person driving the bus to the Politburo member hammered away on those two themes.

02:01:04.060 Our state directed democracy is superior to your fuzzy, whatever that kind of democracy is that you have.

02:01:11.740 And our state directed capitalism, which has produced growth rates of 12%, 8%, 10% is superior to your market driven capitalism.

02:01:20.660 And we will beat you on both those fronts.

02:01:24.200 And they are making yards on that internationally.

02:01:27.080 And so I think there's leadership needed in the Western world.

02:01:30.580 Hopefully Canada could provide some of it to counter that, which means strengthening our version of democracy and strengthening our practice of market-based capitalism.

02:01:39.760 Do you think the CCP and its machinations, so to speak, does pose an economic threat to Canada?

02:01:48.720 Or do you think that the deficiencies of their system will eventually manifest themselves once they, I mean, it's easy to, to have growth rates of 10% when you're starting from zero, essentially.

02:01:59.940 And so, well, I, I, I personally believe that there are fundamental weaknesses in that state directed everything on that subject.

02:02:10.840 Like the last time I went to China, I went after I was out of the parliament, I knew some of these people in the international liaison department.

02:02:18.040 And I said, I, cause I was on this theme of training our politicians.

02:02:21.080 I said, I want to visit three of your main training facilities for communist party officials.

02:02:26.380 I didn't know if they agree or not, but sure.

02:02:28.900 They said, sure.

02:02:29.980 So I went and I visited three of these complexes for training communist party officials.

02:02:34.720 And they are impressive.

02:02:36.600 Now, of course you've got to attend.

02:02:38.160 You don't have an option of not attending.

02:02:40.620 So that, but they offered five major courses.

02:02:43.340 One of the major ones was military still today, 20% military, uh, to, to rise to the top.

02:02:50.680 You have to serve in, uh, several different district.

02:02:53.540 You can't just spend your entire political life in one district.

02:02:56.380 You had to be, if you want to get to the national level, you had to serve in different districts.

02:03:01.400 Uh, you, you had to serve at different levels, municipal or state provincial before you could get to the national.

02:03:09.320 You had to come back, uh, every five years for a six month refresher course at these, uh, training facilities, which are like university campuses with buildings and training facilities, think tanks.

02:03:22.320 Uh, and, uh, very, very frighteningly impressive when you compared it with our haphazard way of preparing people for public life.

02:03:31.700 Uh, and, uh, at one of these think tanks, uh, one of these campuses, there was a, I had a meeting with a scholar from one of their think tank.

02:03:40.700 And I asked him this convoluted question.

02:03:42.800 I wasn't sure it was even getting through because it was done through translation.

02:03:45.860 Although a lot of those people speak English too, but they use the translation to give them time to think.

02:03:50.380 So I said, uh, in the days of the Roman empire, cause they, they like history or they'll talk history.

02:03:55.340 I said, suppose the leaders of the Roman empire, the Caesars had got together and had a strategic meeting to figure out, is there any threat to our regime?

02:04:04.020 Is there anybody that could ever replace us as inconceivable as that is?

02:04:08.580 And somebody might say, well, you've got to watch those Persians in the East.

02:04:11.520 You know, there could be a revival of the Persian empire.

02:04:14.140 You got to watch those.

02:04:15.400 And someone else might say, well, we've got to watch those Northern barbarians.

02:04:18.500 You know, they're getting pretty aggressive and they could march down the ruins that we built right into Rome.

02:04:23.240 And somebody else might say, we may have an internal problem.

02:04:25.500 We've got all these slaves and disenfranchised people, but nobody would have ever guessed that there was an obscure little sect in the backwater of the Roman empire and Judea, that there was a guy in a carpenter shop and a group of 12 people.

02:04:44.820 So that his idea and his followers would someday, Constantine, a Christian guy would sit on the throne of Rome and turn it into the Holy Roman Empire.

02:04:56.280 You would never have thought of that.

02:04:57.500 So I get this 10 minutes.

02:04:59.000 So I asked his scholar, could it possibly be that it's somewhere in some backwater in China that nobody's thinking about or painting, there's some idea or some group that could actually replace the Communist Party?

02:05:16.240 So he doesn't answer right away because there's a Communist Party official in the room.

02:05:20.740 We've got to be a little bit careful of it.

02:05:23.500 And what he did say, though, surprised me.

02:05:25.760 He says the environmental movement.

02:05:30.780 And that hastily said, but we understand that.

02:05:34.600 These young people are very much concerned about this.

02:05:37.960 But we understand that.

02:05:39.140 We're going to deal with that.

02:05:40.560 We're going to head it off in the past.

02:05:42.360 Right.

02:05:42.660 Well, that goes along with people like Bjorn Lomborg's supposition that once people hit a certain standard of living, they start to become radically concerned with broader environmental issues.

02:05:51.760 But they're no longer desperate to feed themselves and they can they can look at the quality, the broader quality of their environment.

02:05:59.940 Yeah.

02:06:00.460 But I was very surprised at that.

02:06:02.020 And again, again, it shows that we're competing.

02:06:04.940 Maybe that's another front you're going to end up competing with them on.

02:06:07.740 They're going to try to demonstrate that citizen directed democracy and citizen directed capitalism can respond more quickly and better to the environmental challenge than your system.

02:06:19.740 So all of this suggests the need to pull up the socks.

02:06:22.820 So I kind of end up I'm supposed to be retired and writing and doing some consulting on this, but I end up my deepest beliefs is that Canada could be there is a better Canada than what we got now that Canada can be.

02:06:38.640 And that requires recognizing the distinctiveness and the current concerns and aspirations of Western Canada as a part of Canada, that Canada can be better governed as a democracy.

02:06:49.980 And there's things that can be done to strengthen the democracy, that conservatives can make a bigger and better contribution to that Canada, the future and that better democracy, and that people of faith can make a bigger and better contribution if they conduct themselves wisely and graciously.

02:07:09.400 That would probably be my summary statement of belief.

02:07:14.300 Well, that's I think that's a really good place to stop.

02:07:17.020 Yes, okay.

02:07:18.840 Well, I very much enjoyed this, George.

02:07:20.620 And I hope it's of some interest and use to your audience.

02:07:26.020 Yeah, well, it's been a pleasure talking to you again.

02:07:29.240 And I'd very much like to thank you for taking the time to do this.

02:07:33.380 I have one final question, I guess.

02:07:35.780 Do you know if, I know Pierre Paul is using YouTube and some of the new communication techniques to his great advantage.

02:07:43.880 Is there any recognition among the conservatives, let's say, that while YouTube, which is the biggest television network that's ever existed by a huge margin and has almost no costs for utilization, let's say, is there any understanding that there is the possibility of communicating directly with constituents and even bypassing the media in some sense?

02:08:06.600 Oh, I think there is.

02:08:08.600 I think there is.

02:08:09.400 I'm not that close to the sort of the federal party's communications effort, but Pierre would be very much, he's a very articulate and with it, a member of parliament.

02:08:19.620 He was a high school student when he was on my constituency board in Calgary Southwest.

02:08:25.420 He's had an, again, he's had a long interest.

02:08:27.700 If you were a scout, if you were a scout, scouting the arenas, you would have seen Pierre as, this is a fellow that's got something to contribute.

02:08:37.660 And I'll be talking with him soon on this show.

02:08:40.360 Oh, yes.

02:08:40.820 Well, he would be very good.

02:08:42.060 But my one worry with the people that one reaches, and I'm not in any way trying to insult your audience, but with a lot of the younger people, I worry sometimes about substituting discussion, blogging, tweeting, commentating for actually doing something.

02:09:02.420 That's why I entitled that book of mine, Doing Something.

02:09:06.000 I've seen some of these younger political people that get into a, again, it's this virtual politics, they get into a virtual loop.

02:09:13.800 They talk about the issue, they blog about it, they tweet about it.

02:09:19.040 But when I ask them, did you do anything?

02:09:22.680 Like, did you go and write to your member of parliament?

02:09:26.260 Did you call anybody?

02:09:27.460 Did you attend something?

02:09:29.460 Did you consider running for office?

02:09:32.180 I tend to get a blank.

02:09:33.500 And I think the more of this, what, the enormous work can be done in that virtual arena, but the more it can be pushed into, okay, we've discussed this, we've talked about it, what are we going to do about it?

02:09:46.200 I used to tend to end my meetings, sometimes quite antagonistically almost with an office.

02:09:51.140 Like, I didn't come here to this meeting in wherever.

02:09:54.980 I didn't come here just to entertain you or to tell you stories.

02:09:57.760 I came here because we want to elect somebody to change this.

02:10:01.360 And if you're just here to listen to me or to have jokes or have coffee afterwards, this is not the place for you.

02:10:08.000 Are you prepared to do it?

02:10:08.960 I used to push people hard on that because it's a little bit easy in our system to substitute the discussion for action.

02:10:18.100 Right.

02:10:18.400 So how do you tie the discussion and even the discussion with the public to concrete maneuvers within the existing political system that will make change?

02:10:27.800 Well, yeah, by giving them a little list of some things they can do.

02:10:33.060 Like if I was at a meeting where they're discussing this balance between health protection measures on COVID and the protection of your rights and responsibilities under the Constitution.

02:10:45.900 And, you know, if you're concerned about your limitations on your rights and freedoms, have you written to the Attorney General?

02:10:55.240 Have you called the Justice Minister's office?

02:10:57.580 Have you talked to your MP to register that concern?

02:11:02.340 Have you, you know, have you done something?

02:11:04.320 And often just a little thing starts to trigger something.

02:11:08.480 Have you gone to a meeting of other people that are doing this?

02:11:10.500 Have you, here's three think tanks that are doing some work in this area.

02:11:14.020 They desperately need money and more contacts.

02:11:16.020 And can you contact any one of them?

02:11:17.700 Just getting some little action like that usually leads to something else, if the person's action-oriented.

02:11:22.780 So is that, are those things detailed out in your book?

02:11:26.100 Because I think people don't know these action steps.

02:11:28.980 Yeah, yeah, fair enough.

02:11:30.000 On both the Democratic front, which is relevant to, you don't have to be a conservative, I say to everybody, we're all small d Democrats and we're all Canadians here in our political arena.

02:11:38.700 So that we have in common.

02:11:40.260 So these measures to strengthen democracy are in everybody's advantage.

02:11:44.480 And then I've got another section that deals with just strengthening conservatism, if that's your orientation.

02:11:49.960 Yeah, do something, do something.

02:11:53.920 Well, thank you very much again.

02:11:55.440 Thank you, Jordan.

02:11:56.420 It was a pleasure seeing you.

02:11:57.740 Let's keep in touch.

02:11:58.860 Yes, definitely.

02:12:00.000 Okay, bye-bye.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - December 20, 2021

211. Voice of the Canadian West ｜ Preston Manning

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