511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre

Jordan Peterson sits down with Canadian member of Parliament Pierre Poilievre (and likely the next Prime Minister). They discuss his role as Leader of the Opposition, the untapped energy sector, the real reason Canadians cannot afford homes, how Justin Trudeau has walked the country off a cliff, and what will likely play out in 2025 leading up to the much-needed election. This episode was filmed on December 21st, 2024 | Links | For Pierre Poilievre: On X https://x.com/PierrePoilievre?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor On Facebook https://www.facebook.com/PierrePoilievreMP/ Website https://www.conservative.ca Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You take the total business investment of the United States divided by the total number of workers in America, it's 28 grand. In Canada, it's 15 grand. The Canadian worker gets about 55 cents for every dollar of his American, and they're both measured in USD. In Vancouver, more money goes to bureaucrats than goes to the carpenters, electricians, and plumbers who build the place. And to add insult to injury, tradespeople who build homes can't afford to live in them. Why is it that we're still importing oil when we've got the world's third biggest supply? Why is it we can't export our natural gas?

• 0:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  I think that was perhaps the single stupidest thing I ever heard a politician say. Your federal government spent $6,000 of your family's money going over their budget.

• 0:40Speaker 00

  They've squeezed the taxpayer out of every last dime, and they're still $62 billion short.

• 0:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's worse than that because I suspect that the true picture is a lot more dismal than we know. Okay, so that's going to be dumped on you sometime in the next year.

• 0:55Speaker 00

  They get the party, I get the hangover.

• 0:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  Eight years from now, what does it look like?

• 1:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Hello, everybody. I had the opportunity and the privilege today to speak with Mr. Pierre Poliev, who is the leader of Canada's federal Conservative Party, but also barring catastrophe and God willing, Canada's next prime minister. A transition in power in this country is likely to take place sometime between March and October or November of 2025. And it appears very probable that Pierre Poliev is the heir presumptive and will be the next prime minister of Canada. And so I talked to Mr. Poliev two and a half years ago.

• 1:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  Which was quite shocking to me. I thought it had been more recently than that. And a lot is transpired in the meantime. What did I talk about with Pierre? Well, I think mostly what I did was give Canadians and people on the international side a chance to see who this man is. In an hour and a half of discussion and the extra half an hour on the Daily Wire side, you have enough time to get a sense of how someone responds spontaneously and emotionally and cognitively to complex and challenging questions in a manner that's not rehearsed. That's the huge advantage of the podcast format. We talked about all the stories that

• 2:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  all the stories that Mr. Poliev has heard in his thousands of event interactions with Canadians in industrial settings, in manufacturing settings, in academic settings, so that he could inform himself about the true situation that's facing Canadians struggling to make ends meet, despite their best efforts now, which is a dismal reality in Canada with its excessive housing prices and diminishing economy. Most importantly perhaps, what is his vision of the future that both threatens and provides opportunity for Canadians? How is it possible for the citizens of this great country to dig themselves out of the

• 3:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  malaise and pit that has been dug for them and by them over the last nine years? And what could be done to remove the impediments such that this country could become the dynamic industrial powerhouse that it certainly could easily become? So, join us for all that. So sir, it's been almost two and a half years since we sat down to talk the time before. So I guess the first thing I'd like to know is, what have you been doing during that time? I'd like to hear I'd like to hear about your day-to-day schedule and your week-to-week schedule. Lay out your job.

• 4:05Speaker 00

  Basically, we have two parts to my professional life. It's very bifurcated. There's the Parliament Hill side, which is, you know, early morning meeting with my leadership team, House Leader, Deputy Leader, Whip, etc., to plan out the day, the battle plan for our parliamentary committees, question period, etc. That is punctuated by one weekly caucus meeting and just the daily prosecution of the government, which is the quintessential role of an opposition leader. And then the other part to my life is touring. I asked my assistant today how many events we had done over the last year and he said it was exactly 600.

• 4:48Speaker 00

  I mean, a few weeks ago was 570 something. So we've done 600 events and those are like tours at mills, mines, factories, farms, high-tech facilities. And we tour in, see how the place operates. Then I give a short speech, do a question and answer, and then I just mull about and shake hands with the workers for 25 minutes to an hour and then I go on to the next stop and do it all over again. And we did that in nine provinces and two territories this year.

• 5:25Speaker 00

  And so that's a summary of my workload and work plan to do my job.

• 5:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  And you said 600 events, you made allusion when we were driving over here that the weekends are particularly packed, that you'll do like 10 events on Saturday or Sunday.

• 5:43Speaker 00

  Right.

• 5:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so a typical event, what do you enjoy about the events? Why are they useful and what do you learn?

• 5:50Speaker 00

  Well, first of all, you get a practical insight into how the country actually works. Like who makes the widgets? How do those get made? How do, how does our supply chain come together? What skill sets do these incredible workers have? What background qualified them to be a licensed welder or to run a CNC machine or to be the CEO of a 300-person company that supplies parts into the American economy? And that practical insight, I think, is important if you want to lead a government

• 6:34Speaker 00

  and a national economy. So you learn a lot. Then I get to hear the stories of the people who work in these places and get their feedback on what they want, what their dreams and aspirations are.

• 6:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, I want to turn to that in some detail. Let me ask you about the parliamentary side too, because I think it'd be useful for people to know. How you prepare for your, for what you do in parliament? I don't, it isn't obvious to me that people exactly understand the business of being in opposition, you know, at a really practical level.

• 7:09Speaker 00

  Right.

• 7:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  How do you, what do you see as your major function? I know you're there to, to, to push back against the government and to question and criticize, but it isn't obvious how you go about preparing for that, or how you decide what issues you're going to focus on, and how you distribute the responsibilities among your, your caucus and your, and your broader team.

• 7:31Speaker 00

  So, you know, it, there's a lot of discretion. You make up your mind when you wake up in the morning. You read the news, you see, I have a, a team that gives me a, a full briefing of all the, the published news from the mainstream media, all the news from the independent and ethnic media, all, a download of the entire social media landscape. And then I respond to that by saying, well, I think these are the, we're gonna, we have roughly 25 questions we can ask. And I'll say, well, we, I want 10 on inflation, and three on violent crime, and four on, whatever the subject happens to be in the day. And I want this committee to focus on this today, and that committee to focus on that

• 8:13Speaker 00

  today, and then our teams go out and we do it. And the, I've been very blessed because my caucus is extremely talented, and they don't need a lot of direction. But we've been acting in unison, and I think that's why our message is pumping out so clearly to people. It's not a cacophony of sound, it's a clear drumbeat. And that's why people are hearing and appreciating our message.

• 8:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  So you feel that your party's well organized at the moment?

• 8:40Speaker 00

  Extremely well organized.

• 8:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so what's your evidence for that?

• 8:43Speaker 00

  Well, by every measure, by every statistical measure.

• 8:48Speaker 00

  We're stronger than any political party has been in, well, maybe even my lifetime, objectively speaking. Memberships, fundraising, poll numbers.

• 8:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so people are positive in consequence of that. So it's a lot easier to lead an organization when it's successful.

• 9:07Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 9:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  Obviously, people are much more enthusiastic.

• 9:09Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 9:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  Why do you think you're in that position? What's going on that's setting the stage for that? And I don't just mean the failures on the Trudeau side. I mean, what do you think you guys are doing right?

• 9:21Speaker 00

  Well, we have a clear mission statement, and people know exactly why we're in this. You know, whenever someone asks me, they say, "I'm thinking of running for parliament, or for mayor, or some other political position, what's your advice?" Well, I say, "Well, before I get to the advice, I have a very simple question. Why do you want this job?" And it might seem like a simplistic question, but it's actually the most important question in life: why? Why are you doing what you're doing? And our answer to that is to bring back the Canadian promise, that anyone who works hard gets a great paycheck and a pension that buys them good food and a nice home and a safe neighborhood, that anyone from anywhere

• 10:06Speaker 00

  can do anything, and that people are in charge of their own lives. That's effectively what we want to deliver. So every day when I'm in parliament...

• 10:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  So that's a very local vision, in a sense, right? It doesn't have the grandiosity of an international utopian vision, for example. It's very down-to-earth.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  I think people are sick and tired of grandiosity. In fact, I think there's something grand about a family that can go on a nice road trip and share stories and build lasting memories that the kids will remember when they're 85 years old.

• 10:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  Despite producing all that nasty carbon dioxide.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  That's right. But I think those things are grand, and I think the problem we've had in this country and in all of the countries that have been afflicted by this horrendous... Utopian woke-ism is that it's been focused on the grand the grandiosity of the leadership of the egotistical personalities on top and not the things that are grand and great about the common people. And that is another reason why I think we're doing very well. People are saying, finally, there's someone who's focused on letting me take back control of my own life and create a great future for my family. And so that is, to answer your question, one of the reasons why we've had such incredible success over the last two years.

• 11:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so there's a lot of distrust, generally speaking, in relationship to, I would say, establishment organizations and political elites all across the West. A lot of that well-earned.

• 11:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  Why should Canadians believe that the vision that you just laid out is something that you hold personally dear and not merely, what would you say, a set of carefully calculated campaign slogans?

• 11:55Speaker 00

  Well, I look back at everything I've done for my entire political career to the time I was a teenager. You know, some people have even dug up my old university essays, and I've been saying precisely the same thing the entire time. You know, when I was 20, I wrote an essay as Prime Minister I would, and the title was Building Canada on Freedom. The entire piece was about making the government small and maximizing personal freedom. That's basically what I'm doing now.

• 12:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  So you have consistency going for you?

• 12:27Speaker 00

  When I launched my leadership race, I literally had the same language in my leadership launch speech that I had put in that essay 22 or 23 years earlier. And when I was part of the Harper government, we basically fought for and did the same things then that I'm proposing to do now. So as much as you can be assured of anything any political leader says, I've got evidence to back it up.

• 12:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so one of the things that's been very distressing to observe, I would say, and I'm going to use the UK as an example. I mean, the UK had 14 straight years of conservative government.

• 13:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  And, you know, as far as I'm concerned, thank God for that because it could have been Labour. But having said that, they fall, they fell 100% prey to the blandishments of the net zero types and brought forward really a catastrophic energy policy. And the UK is suffering dreadfully for that. And their immigration policy, I mean, Keir Starmer apologized for it, which was something remarkable to behold, and so did Kemi Badenoch, who now runs the Conservatives in the UK. Now, the reason I'm bringing them up as an example is because while they were a conservative government and they certainly didn't govern by anything approximating conservative principles, and so how do you, how do you feel about the probability that if the Conservatives in Canada take power,

• 13:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  that they'll be enticed into this global utopian delusion that seems to have enveloped so many, so many leaders, kind of regardless of their political stripe? What do you think, if anything, can inoculate you or has inoculated you against that?

• 14:07Speaker 00

  I know better.

• 14:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, elaborate. What do you mean?

• 14:11Speaker 00

  I'm not going to do that. And it will be hard because the temptation will be, this is the mistake that conservative parties around the world have made countless times. They think, well, anybody who's got a conservative mindset is already voting for me so I can go off and chase the ideas of my political opponents and then everyone will love me because I'll have the Conservatives due to the fact that I have the name Conservative. And then I'll have all these other people because I've embraced their contrary direction.

• 14:42Speaker 00

  And in the short term, it works because you're you're managed to have all of these people under and all of the different political ideologies captured in one tent. But the problem happens when the policies are a disaster. And then people wake up and go, oh, my God, my taxes are now up. My inflation is out of control. The deficit is spiraling. There's crime on the streets. So it would, does the temptation exist to try and take on these, the political policies of the socialists in the, the, the short term? Sure, but it's one that I will fiercely resist because I know that by the fourth year of my mandate,

• 15:27Speaker 00

  people would be enraged because their lives would be even worse. So it will be tough, though, like it's going to be a trade off.

• 15:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  The temptation, I mean, I think many, many leaders fall prey to the temptation to shine on the international stage. Right? I mean, I can't remember who it was in the UK. I believe it was the previous Labour Party leader who said that decisions in Westminster were essentially irrelevant because all the important things were happening internationally. Right? And so if people are involved in status climbing and they hit the national pinnacle, there's always, then there's the international world to, you know, what would you say to dominate or to, to impress? And that's, I think that the power of that temptation or even of that peer pressure can't be underestimated. So, okay, so now you've been in these events, these 600 events that you've gone to.

• 16:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  So let's say that's something approximating 1,000 to 1,200 since we last talked. You spent a lot of time speaking to, and I presume, listening to ordinary Canadians. I heard you made a speech in the, heard you make a speech in the House of Commons that went viral in the last couple of weeks, and you spoke very persuasively on behalf of working class Canadians. And so tell us what you've, tell us what you've learned, what you've heard over the last couple of years and how that's shaped you and changed you, let's say, as you've moved from, well, as you, as you shifted your position up the political hierarchy and, and are poised, really likely to take the reins in Canada at some point in the next year. You've listened to all these people. And so what have you learned?

• 17:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  And, and, and what has it made you convinced of, let's say?

• 17:07Speaker 00

  Well, first of all, people. There's the bad news and the good news. The bad news is that people feel like they've done absolutely everything right and their lives are trapped. They, you know, young people say, "Look, okay, I went through. I got an education. I work nonstop and I have made the calculation that there is no mathematical path for me to own a house." It's just not possible. In Toronto here, for example, if you take the average income and the average house price, it would take you 29 years to save up for a down payment. So, you know, if you're a...

• 17:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  For a down payment?

• 17:51Speaker 00

  For a down payment, not to pay it off, forget paying it off. And so if you're a young woman who's got a biological clock, obviously, well, do the math. You know, you start off at, let's say, you're 25. Well, you're going to be in your 50s before you can afford the average house. So how are you ever going to have kids?

• 18:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  And that's about the time when people think about downsizing from their house.

• 18:14Speaker 00

  That's what they used to think about downsizing. And, you know, they usually had their house paid off back by the time they were in their early 50s. So just to show how dreadfully things have worsened. That's the picture of the youth. Then there's the kind of middle-aged people who do have kids already and they're terrified of the dangers in the streets. I mean, our streets are just being overtaken by drugs and gangsterism and other dangers and they want safety again. And then you have business owners that are saying, "There's just no way to continue to compete in Canada. We have to look at moving." And that means the next 200 jobs we create is going to be in Ohio or Florida

• 18:59Speaker 00

  or some other place than Canada. That's the kind of overview that I get. The good news, though, is that... People do now have some hope. They think that things can be turned around. And they have clearly and correctly diagnosed the problem, which is entirely political. There is no, there is no physical geographic reason why Canada should struggle to supply people with great opportunities of homeownership and family formation. In fact, we should be the richest country in the world. And people increasingly know that, and they know that if we make the right, albeit difficult, political decisions,

• 19:44Speaker 00

  that they will once again be able to do as their parents did, which is to say, get a house, start a family, live in a safe neighborhood, raise their kids with good traditional values. That's another thing I'm finding is that a lot of people are really getting back to the, those values that we were told were unfashionable. They, they, they want, you know, young people today, they want to have families.

• 20:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, there's been a real conservative swing, especially among young men. Well, no wonder, because they've been demonized for what, 30 straight years for every aspect of their masculinity, from their play preferences to their proclivity to destroy the planet with their ambition. And so there's definitely a, an opportunity there and clearly your political party and you are capitalizing on that, that you have the support from, from, from young people increasingly, right, across Canada.

• 20:36Speaker 00

  We are winning among youth. In fact, the youth were the first to come on board with me. My rallies were overwhelmingly populated with youth, which is not normal for conservatives.

• 20:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 20:46Speaker 00

  And the reason is, is because in your youth, of course, you, you, as you write it, people, young people want to have the adventure of their lives. They want to go into the wilderness and earn a living and bring it home and

• 21:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  Do something responsible.

• 21:02Speaker 00

  Have a purpose that's bigger than just short-term, short-termism. And I think, you know,

• 21:11Speaker 00

  Twenty years ago, the socialists would go to university campuses and say, "Vote for us and we'll let you be a kid forever. We'll give you free stuff and you'll never have to get a job." And that was very temporarily popular across the Western world. But then young people woke up and found out this was not a utopia. It was a total dystopia. And that all the things that they really valued and wanted for their lives were impossible when they were being borne down upon by this massive state. They've learned that help is the sunny side of control. And so now, young people are... I love this. This is great news. Our young people are saying, "I want to start a business.

• 21:54Speaker 00

  I want to invent something. I want to create things. I want to become a tradesman. And then when I get good enough at that, I want to hire five other tradesmen. And by the time I retire, I want to have 300 employees. And then I want to give that company to my kids." These are the stories that I hear when I go out and about in Canada. And the great news is, we can have all those things. That's the optimistic message that I have for people. But we've got a limitless supply of resources here. We're like a cornucopia. You know, the third biggest supply of oil, fifth biggest supply of natural gas, biggest supply of uranium, fifth biggest supply of lithium. We've got not one, not two, not three, but four coasts to tide water.

• 22:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 22:40Speaker 00

  We live next to the biggest military and economic superpower the world has ever seen. We have a highly educated population and the best system of government in the history of the world, the parliamentary system. Not the best government, but the best system of government. So all these massive advantages, we just need to unleash that potential.

• 23:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right. So the unhappiness that you're seeing among young people seems to me to be a consequence of the mismatch between the opportunity they see right in front of them and their frustration at the fact that that opportunity can't be capitalized on, even if they're contributing their fair share.

• 23:21Speaker 00

  And they're definitely doing their part. Like, they really are. You know, it's always been a habit of older people to say, "You know, all the youth these days..." When I look at the young people today... All they do is work. I am astonished when I, when I meet young university students, how much they work outside of their studies just to scrape by, how many hours of labor they do as waitresses or in another service job so that they can pay their bills, way more than when I was a student, you know, 25 years ago.

• 23:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, when I was a kid in Alberta, I could work in the summer and I didn't work on the rig, so I didn't have one of the high paying jobs. I had a more, what would you say, a job that was secondarily associated with the resource economy. I could make enough money in the summer in two months, four months, to pay for the tuition and my entire year's rent.

• 24:17Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 24:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right.

• 24:19Speaker 00

  And now these kids are working 20, 30 hours a week in addition to a full course load, and they look exhausted. When I meet young people today, they are exhausted. They have bags under their eyes and all they do is work. And the worst part about it is not that they're working all the time, it's that they don't see a light at the end of the tunnel.

• 24:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, that's a genuine breakdown of the social contract, right? Because the deal, like you said, the deal was supposed to be, if you do things right, you'll be rewarded.

• 24:50Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 24:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right? And that's the intergenerational compact essentially. And there isn't anything that defines hopelessness more clearly than seeing that if you do all the right things, the pathway is paved to failure.

• 25:04Speaker 00

  Right.

• 25:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right? So that's so demoralizing. And you know, what's even worse about that is that the people who are most demoralized by that are precisely the people who would be most productive and hardworking. Because the ones that are sponging along, they don't give a damn anyways, right? It's, they're not losing any glorious future and they're not sacrificing for it anyways. But it's, it's really not good when your economy is set up to punish people who are entrepreneurial and hardworking.

• 25:28Speaker 00

  And that's what it does right now.

• 25:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so, so let's, let's delve into that a little bit. So I've been tracking economic statistics in relationship to Canada and sort of left me open mouthed in amazement at our dismal condition. So from what I've been able to understand, the richest people per capita in terms of GDP per person.

• 25:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Gross domestic product per person, so that's total productivity, is Ontario. And Ontario inhabitants are now poorer per capita than inhabitants of Mississippi. And that's the poorest American state. So the inhabitants of Canada's richest province are poorer than the inhabitants of the United States poorest state. And that's actually occurred primarily in the last 10 years.

• 26:21Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 26:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  And because we were basically at parity before that. And had historically been not quite as rich as the Americans with some, you know, blips above them. But pretty much tracking them one to one. And now it's 60%, something like that. And that's, and that's not all the bad news because it's 60% in terms of absolute wealth. And a real estate market that's twice as expensive approximately on average.

• 26:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right. So now.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  It's really bad. It's really incredible. Like 10 years ago, the New York Times wrote an article, "Welcome to Canada, Home of the World's Most Affluent Middle Class." And in that article, the Times had calculated that median American and Canadian incomes were tied. And the Canadians were slightly better off. Now, part of that was because of the 09, 08, 09 financial crisis hit them harder than it hit us. But still, now, per capita GDP in the States is $22,000 higher than in Canada. Measured in USD. So that's about almost 30,000 measured in.

• 27:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right. So that's a whole other income essentially. That's a whole other part-time income.

• 27:36Speaker 00

  Exactly. And, and then as you correctly point out, their real estate is significantly cheaper than ours. So their, their dollars go a lot further, even when you match up the exchange rates. And which worse than that is that the leading indicators are even more horrific. And leading indicators, for example, are investment dollars. Because your wealth tomorrow is determined by your investment today. So if your employer, for example, is buying lots of new tools and technology, you're going to be able to crank out more widgets. So you crank out those widgets, then you can ultimately make more income down the road.

• 28:18Speaker 00

  If you take business investment and divide it by the number of workers, the American worker gets $28,000 of investment, measured in US dollars.

• 28:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  This is per capita?

• 28:31Speaker 00

  Per worker. Per worker, per member of the labor force.

• 28:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay.

• 28:35Speaker 00

  So you take the total business investment of the United States divided by the total number of workers in America, it's 28 grand. In Canada, it's 15 grand. So we got, the Canadian worker gets about 55 cents for every dollar of his American, and they're both measured in USD. So how is the Canadian worker?

• 28:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's investment in future productivity?

• 28:54Speaker 00

  That's investment in, in machines, in technology, warehouses, factories.

• 29:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  I see.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  Any, any capital investment that businesses make, divided by the number of workers, that's the measurement. So now, that means they're getting better technology, better, um, new machines, uh, better tools than our workers, and they will be able to crank out even greater wages for their people than we will, unless we catch up with that. Our productivity is another major problem, like right now, uh, and that's productivity sounds complicated, it's actually extremely simple. You just take the GDP and you divide it by the hours worked in the country. So, American GDP is $80. So for every hour an American worker works, on average, he produce, he or she produces $80 of GDP.

• 29:46Speaker 00

  Of GDP. In Canada, it's 50.

• 29:50Speaker 00

  So that's every hour, so that means we have to work 60% more just to make the same amount, uh, and have the same level of, uh, income to buy food and housing. And so that, that's the, now, that sounds like a bunch of wonk speak that should all, might seem like it only matters to someone staring at a spreadsheet or a graph or a chart, but in fact, that's reflected in the fact that our 2 million people are lined up at food banks because they can't afford food and, uh, 80% of youth can't afford homes, and... And our quality of life is and the things we can afford to provide our kids have fallen back so much.

• 30:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, that's a pretty stark and easily comprehensible statistic. I mean, if you work and you produce eighty dollars worth of goods and services in an hour compared to working and producing fifty, obviously, that's a substantial shortfall.

• 30:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  So, and is that, is there a starker indicator of the economic disparity between the US and Canada than that? Or do you think that's the primary statistic?

• 30:54Speaker 00

  I mean, I think housing costs are another one. I mean, there was a study out just ten days ago that has Toronto and Vancouver now by far the most unaffordable housing markets in North America. And so, you know, housing costs are fifty percent higher in Toronto than they are in Chicago, even though Chicago workers make fifty percent more money. The same is true between Vancouver and Seattle. Seattle workers make way more than Vancouver workers. But housing is sixty or seventy percent more expensive in Vancouver. So, on all the measures.

• 31:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  By a lot, by a lot.

• 31:37Speaker 00

  By a lot.

• 31:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 31:38Speaker 00

  And we're, and we're paying more.

• 31:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  More by a lot. Right, and most of that's transpired in the last ten years.

• 31:45Speaker 00

  Yes, and we're paying the difference by accumulating enormous quantities of debt. Our, our households are by far the most indebted in the G7. When you take, you divide total household debt by GDP, we now have a bigger stock of, of household debt than our entire economy. We are more indebted as households than the Americans were right before the oh eight financial crisis. And so what we have as a model in Canada is we have artificial scarcity imposed by very heavy and restrictive state, confiscatory state, that suppresses production.

• 32:24Speaker 00

  But in order to allow for consumption, we print money and borrow money and then flood the economy with that money.

• 32:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so that's another problem. So that's the inflationary problem.

• 32:35Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 32:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  Now, the problem with inflation, just many problems with inflation, but one of them is that it particularly punishes people who are thrifty and who save.

• 32:44Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 32:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right. So inflation punishes the people who forego gratification to invest in the future.

• 32:51Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 32:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so that's a very bad idea.

• 32:53Speaker 00

  It's a horrible... Inflation is the single most immoral tax for so many reasons. One, it takes from savers and people who are trying to be responsible, thus making it impossible to be responsible. Because you will, if you refuse to play the inflation game of borrowing money to buy things you can't afford, someone else inevitably will and you won't be able to afford anything.

• 33:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:18Speaker 00

  So you ultimately have to act responsibly. It's like Milton Friedman was asked, "What would you do with your money in times of inflation?" He said, "Spend it."

• 33:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 33:26Speaker 00

  Like, the first thing you want to do when inflation is out of control is to make sure you get rid of this thing that's losing its value. The second reason it's immoral is it takes from the poor, because the poorest people cannot put, they do not have the ability to buy inflation-proof assets like gold and real estate and fancy watches and art collections and wine, fancy wines and things that go up with or even exceed inflation. So it's a very big wealth transfer from the have, from the, from the, from the poor and the working class to the very, very wealthy. A very small group of people actually get richer.

• 34:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  So the socialist policies that provide goods and services to Canadians, let's say, or denizens of other countries by printing money actually punish the poor brutally.

• 34:12Speaker 00

  Oh, absolutely.

• 34:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  In consequence of the inflation that they generate.

• 34:15Speaker 00

  Yes, I mean, all the socialist policies in practice take, redistribute from the working class to the super wealthy, in practice. And I can prove that again and again and again.

• 34:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  Not in theory.

• 34:27Speaker 00

  In practice.

• 34:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 34:28Speaker 00

  In practice, in practice, they, with all the redistribution that happens in these so-called socialist countries ultimately goes from the working class to the super wealthy. That is the reality.

• 34:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so...

• 34:41Speaker 00

  But just one last thing on inflation. The final reason why it's so immoral is nobody votes on it. The basic principle of our parliamentary system is the government can't tax... What Parliament has not voted, the people must, no taxation without representation, right? But no one ever votes to have the money printing happen. And so the inflation is adopted secretly. And you blame the grocer because groceries are more expensive, or your local gas station because gas is more, or your realtor because how is, in fact, it was actually the government that bid up all of those things with money printing, and you didn't even know about it.

• 35:22Speaker 00

  So it is silent, it's a silent thief that takes from the poor, it gives to the richest people, and destroys the working class. And that's why I am, I want to crush inflation. We need a policy that seeks to just to stop inflation at all, at all costs.

• 35:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so what would you do to stop inflation?

• 35:41Speaker 00

  Well, we stop the money printing. You know, we need a, we need, and, and the money printing is just a means to fund deficit spending. Governments borrow.

• 35:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Define the deficit, yeah, for people.

• 35:54Speaker 00

  So basically, the deficit is the difference between what the government spends and what it brings in.

• 35:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's usually calculated on a yearly basis.

• 36:02Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 36:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yep. And the debt?

• 36:05Speaker 00

  Well, the debt is just the accumulation of the deficits.

• 36:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 36:07Speaker 00

  So the deficit right now is sixty-two billion dollars, and...

• 36:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  I thought it had a ceiling of, of...

• 36:14Speaker 00

  Forty-one billion, yeah, right.

• 36:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Wasn't that a ceiling?

• 36:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  I guess not, eh?

• 36:18Speaker 00

  I guess not. And, um, look, there are very real present-day consequences for that. Deficits increase the money supply. Uh, central banks effectively facilitate that increase in the money supply, and that causes inflation. And, uh, you know, it's, it's why our, you know, I have a buddy who was, his family moved here from Italy back in nineteen seventy-three. His father worked paving roads, um, and his mother made sandwiches in a seniors' home. They were able to pay off their home ten minutes from Parliament Hill in seven years.

• 36:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 36:58Speaker 00

  Their grandchildren wouldn't be able to save up a down payment for that home in fifteen years, and they will be university educated with all the advantages of having been here two decades. That is the consequence of the money supply growing vastly quicker than the stuff that money buys. So what we have to do is stop growing the money supply and start growing the stuff money buys, right? Produce more energy, grow more food, build more homes. We have to unleash the free enterprise system to produce more stuff of value. And this is where we have to remove the artificial scarcity that the government is imposing on the population.

• 37:37Speaker 00

  Let's incentivize our municipalities to grant the fastest building permits in the world to build homes.

• 37:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  And you have a plan for that in principle?

• 37:48Speaker 00

  Yes, I mean, I'm going to say to the municipal governments, they either they either speed up permits, cut development charges and free up land, or they will lose their federal infrastructure money. So they will have a powerful carrot and stick incentive to speed up home building.

• 38:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  And the percentage of a new house price that's a consequence of government taxation and regulation?

• 38:09Speaker 00

  Well, in Vancouver, it's sixty percent.

• 38:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  Sixty?

• 38:12Speaker 00

  Sixty percent.

• 38:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  Now, does that include the land and the house?

• 38:15Speaker 00

  Yes, that includes everything. So I'll tell you how they calculate it. C D Howe took the cost of building, compared the cost of building a home to the cost of buying a home.

• 38:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 38:26Speaker 00

  And he said, what's the gap between those two things? So they added up land, labor, profit for the developer, materials, and they compared that to the sale price, and they found the gap was one point two million dollars. So that's one point two million dollars of extra cost above and beyond the materials, the labor, the land, and the profit for the developer. So where's that going? Well, the answer is development charges, sales taxes, land transfer taxes, the delays in getting the permit, time is money.

• 39:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:02Speaker 00

  The consultants, lawyers, accountants, lobbyists that the developer has to hire in order to get the approval. That, so in other words, we're spending twice, in Vancouver, we spend twice as much on bureaucrats.

• 39:16Speaker 00

  than we do on all other things combined to build a home. More money goes to bureaucrats than goes to the carpenters, electricians, and plumbers who build the place. And to add insult to injury, those tradespeople who build homes can't afford to live in them.

• 39:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 39:32Speaker 00

  I mean, it is, so what we need to do is slash the bureaucracy. And I'm going to, I'm going to say to the mayors, you're not getting federal infrastructure money until you slash your development charges, speed up your permits. I'm going to take the federal GST off new homes under a certain limit and encourage the provinces to do the same. But we've got so much land. We should have the most affordable housing in the world. We have, it should be dirt cheap because we have the most dirt. We just need to get the government out of the way. The same goes for our resource sector. Why is it that we're still importing oil when we've got the world's third biggest supply? Why is it we can't export our natural gas overseas?

• 40:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  You mean like to Germany and Japan, even when they ask?

• 40:16Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 40:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  Offering multi-decade contracts at, at, at distressed prices because they're so desperate for energy. And we can't make a business case for that famously.

• 40:29Speaker 00

  Yes, then this is the opposite.

• 40:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  I think that was perhaps the single stupidest thing I ever heard a politician say. And that's a really hard contest to win.

• 40:38Speaker 00

  Well, you look at the, the price of natural gas is three to five times higher in both Europe and Asia than it is in North America, which means there's a hell of a lot of profit to arbitrage in getting our product over there. In the last, um, the last 10 years, the Americans have added, I think, six liquefaction plants. The Qataris have massively increased their production. Canada has not completed a single new liquefaction facility. There's one that's supposed to come online soon in Kitimat that was approved by the Harper government. It's only now coming online. The Germans actually built an import terminal in 194 days from concept to completion.

• 41:24Speaker 00

  Um, the, we've had direct formal requests for our natural gas from Japan, Greece, Germany, France, and I'm probably missing some others. Um, we have the fifth biggest supply. We have cold weather, which makes it much cheaper to liquefy gas. It takes 11 days to ship to Asia from B C. It takes 20 days from the U S Gulf Coast. So it's basically half the shipping time. Um, and

• 41:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  And you figured out a way to monetize cold weather?

• 41:54Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly.

• 41:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's a very difficult thing to do.

• 41:56Speaker 00

  Exactly. Which also will help with, with data centers. Data centers, which um, we're going to need data centers for A I and blockchain and countless other things uh that we have, we can, we have the energy for. It takes tremendous amount of energy to, to power these data centers. Apparently a, a chat G P T inquiry is 10 times more energy intensive than a Google inquiry. So I think it's, I think it's 2.9 um watt hours that is necessary to answer one chat G P T question. It's only point three watt hours to, to process a

• 42:40Speaker 00

  Google search. So in other words

• 42:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  The thing about human brains is, it turns out, the remarkable thing about human brains is how smart they are for how little energy they use.

• 42:49Speaker 00

  Right.

• 42:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right. Whereas we're building machines that are super intelligent, but they're very energy hungry.

• 42:54Speaker 00

  Right. Well, we have a lot of artificial intelligence in government as well, but it's a different kind.

• 42:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 43:00Speaker 00

  But, but we could be powering these data centers with Canadian natural gas uh um generators with nuclear. We have the biggest supply of uranium. We invented the Can Do. We have the incredible nuclear physicists and engineers. 60% of Ontario's energy already comes from nuclear. So we could be powering these, these facilities and they're, they're just beasts uh that are going to gobble up electricity.

• 43:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, yeah, the tech companies are absolutely desperate for it.

• 43:28Speaker 00

  Right. I mean, Facebook, I understand they're, they're looking at uh building their own nuclear plant to power.

• 43:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  And Microsoft revitalized Three Mile Island.

• 43:37Speaker 00

  I didn't know that.

• 43:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 43:39Speaker 00

  So why don't

• 43:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  And they bought all the power that it's going to generate.

• 43:42Speaker 00

  We, we have about 250 uh data centers in Canada.

• 43:48Speaker 00

  We could do a hell of a lot more and our secret sauce is our energy, our incredible supply of energy of all kinds, hydro, nuclear, natural gas, you name it. So let's unleash the production of these resources and bring all that money home.

• 44:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  We can try to organize things so that energy superpower wasn't an insulting phrase.

• 44:12Speaker 00

  Well, you know, National Bank did a study, if you want to talk to these environmental loons that hate our energy sector. They said, the great economist Stefan Mariano out of Calgary, National Bank, said if we displaced half of the electricity demand that India will have, added to its grid over the next 20 years by supplying our natural gas instead of them using coal, it would reduce global emissions by 2.5 billion tons, which is three times the emissions of all of Canada.

• 44:51Speaker 00

  So in other words, by exporting our gas, which is half as emissions intensive as coal, we could do far more than we could even do if we shut our entire economy down and disappeared from the earth. So why don't we, why don't we address the environment with energy abundance instead of energy poverty?

• 45:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, that's obviously the moral thing to do with regards to the alleviation of absolute poverty as well.

• 45:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  Because the, the, there's an environmental case to be made for that too, which I learned about about 15 years ago. If you, if you alleviate absolute poverty, the people who are now comparatively wealthy, so say, starting to move into the middle class, take a much longer term view of their lives and their children's lives and their grandchildren's lives, which are now relatively assured, and they're much more likely to take environmental action at the local level. So it looks like the fastest pathway to a genuinely green and sustainable future is through the eradication of absolute poverty.

• 45:54Speaker 00

  Right.

• 45:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  And the most effective route to that is cheap energy. Right, so it looks like we could have a green future and eat our cake too, so to speak, and Canada could definitely be at the forefront of that.

• 46:06Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 46:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  So, okay, so I wanna turn back to some numbers. The deficit this year was sixty-one billion.

• 46:13Speaker 00

  That was last year's deficit.

• 46:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  Sorry, last year, last year, and there's forty million people in Canada, and so that's fifteen hundred dollars per person federal overspending, and that's six thousand dollars essentially per family. So just for everybody watching and listening, your federal government spent six thousand dollars of your family's money last year going over their budget. That's just what they spent in excess of what they had originally budgeted.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  Right. And that's on top of having among the highest taxes in the world, with our, you know, fifty-three percent highest marginal tax rate, plus carbon tax, plus high payroll taxes, plus high business taxes, plus high capital gains taxes. So they're taking in more money than ever before. They've taxed, they've squeezed the taxpayer out of every last dime, and they're still sixty-two billion dollars short.

• 47:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 47:12Speaker 00

  And that's just one level of government, by the way. Then the provinces have deficits that compound the federal one. So we have way too much government, and we need to reduce the size and cost of government and unleash the power of the free market.

• 47:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so it's also the case that, we haven't gone into diagnostics yet, but it's also the case that the Trudeau administration has increased the federal bureaucracy forty percent?

• 47:38Speaker 00

  In bodies, yes.

• 47:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  In bodies, since its inception.

• 47:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right. But despite that, they've also radically increased the amount of money that they're spending on consultants.

• 47:51Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 47:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Who are about as expensive, they're as expensive as employees go.

• 47:56Speaker 00

  Oh, they're way more expensive.

• 47:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, as any employee you could ever possibly have, right? Six hundred dollars an hour, something like that. Right, so they've massively increased the size of the federal bureaucracy, but also massively increased the degree to which they outsource the work that hypothetically the bureaucrats should be doing.

• 48:13Speaker 00

  And this is not, it sounds like one of those sort of annoying things that bothers us all but isn't very substantive. You know, you think these, you know, one guy is making six hundred bucks an hour. We're spending twenty one billion dollars on federal government consultants alone. That's fourteen hundred dollars per Canadian family in federal taxes.

• 48:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  For years.

• 48:42Speaker 00

  Just for consultants.

• 48:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 48:44Speaker 00

  Per year, that's recurring, that's not a one-time cost. So it is an insane amount of money to be spending on that, especially when you have more bureaucrats to supposedly do the work. And arguably, they're delivering worse results than ever before. I mean, our border is more porous, our military has been weakened, and our basic services.

• 49:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  Weakened or devastated?

• 49:09Speaker 00

  Well, you could put it either way. I mean, it's been, I think it's definitely been weakened, and despite the heroism of the men and women who still serve, the political leadership has undermined it in every possible way.

• 49:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right. Immigration, porous border. I think our per capita immigration rate exceeds that of the US, even given the US' open southern border.

• 49:29Speaker 00

  Oh, by far in, we had a population growth of one point two million in twenty twenty-three, that's on a base of forty million people.

• 49:43Speaker 00

  So it's an astonishing number of people to bring in in one year. Everyone now admits that this was a calamity for housing, the job market, and our healthcare.

• 49:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, Trudeau himself walked it back recently.

• 49:57Speaker 00

  He walked it back.

• 49:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  With what was the approximation of a public apology.

• 50:01Speaker 00

  Yes. Well, this is after he called everyone who questioned his immigration policy a racist.

• 50:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 50:07Speaker 00

  And then he adopted the policies that he was calling racist only a year and a half earlier. So.

• 50:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so that's a lot of, I just talked to Terry Glavin, Canadian journalist this week too. And he did about a five dimensional analysis of the trouble that Canada was in. It was blackly comic in some ways because we realized at the end of the conversation or near the end of it, that we hadn't even discussed the ever present threat of the Quebec separatists. And I was thinking, oh my God, like Canada's in a pretty dismal state when the threat of Quebec separatism is number six on the list of threats to the integrity of the country.

• 50:47Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 50:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right? So, okay, so now this is.

• 50:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's making a comeback too, God.

• 50:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, I know, I know.

• 50:53Speaker 00

  The PQ is now leading in the polls in Quebec after they had been completely obliterated in the Harper era. Separatism was completely dead in Quebec and now it's making a resurgence.

• 51:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  And ironically. More out of desperation than anything else.

• 51:06Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, it's interesting that the leader of the PQ has actually been making economic arguments in favor of separatism. They used to always try to avoid that because most Quebecers would say, well, clearly we'd be worse off economically if we left. But because Trudeau has been such, and Freeland and the entire Liberal gang in Ottawa has been such a colossal disaster for our national economy, the separatists are now able to make the argument that they would be better off separating from that calamity.

• 51:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  Maybe that was the plan all along.

• 51:38Speaker 00

  Maybe. I intend to reverse that argument by making our economy strong again. But it really is astonishing to see how badly things have changed in every respect.

• 51:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so this has really transpired in large part over the nine to 10 year period that Trudeau has been governing. And so when you. Are trying to put your finger on what went so, so wrong, so calamitously wrong. What, what do you think the major contributors were? I mean, there's a lot of hydras whose heads we're encountering at the moment. And I imagine it's relatively difficult to trace a causal pathway. But what did we do wrong as a country?

• 52:21Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, we, we, it's, it's, it doesn't. What I'm about to say is not a shock to anyone. We, we have a prime minister who is dedicated to a extremely radical ideology. It is just a rehashed socialism that has been discredited again and again and again throughout the ages. And his, um, basically authoritarian socialism is, has guided him throughout his entire prime ministership. He believes in a state that controls every aspect of your life, your money, your speech, your thought. Um, it controls the economic, uh, all of the industries of the country.

• 53:03Speaker 00

  Um, and every time that has been tried, it is a complete disaster. So it's, there's no mystery involved. And it is the same old disastrous outcome that results from the same old disastrous policies.

• 53:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, that, that have demonstrated themselves as disastrous continuously throughout the 20th century.

• 53:21Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 53:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  So, so one of the things that, that I think is particularly striking, I, I saw Stephen Wilbo, who's probably the minister in Trudeau's cabinet, who's most fervently,

• 53:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, he describes himself as a socialist.

• 53:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, this is the thing. So he described himself as a socialist. And so for all you international people listening, Canada has always had a socialist party, and that's the new Democratic Party, the NDP, which is currently run by Jagmeet Singh, who's propping up Trudeau, all his protestations to the contrary. And Canadians have always been, about 20% of Canadians have.

• 54:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  Stably supported the socialists, the NDP in Canada, and that's been true since about 1962 or something, when they first popped up as a federal party. Now, the Liberals, and that's Trudeau's party, have been a centrist party, historically speaking, and they were the home of the classic Liberals, all things considered. And they like to steal good ideas from the left and from the right and chart Canada's course down the middle. The thing about Trudeau's Liberals is they're not Liberals, is they're far-left socialists. And they came to power in the guise of Liberals, and that meant that their bloody... their government was fraudulent, technically speaking, from the beginning.

• 54:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Because Guelbeau, for example, obviously should have been a member of the NDP and not the classic, traditional Canadian Liberals. But he didn't care, because he knew that had he run for the Socialists, he would have ended up with 20% of the vote, because that's what they always do, and never had any clear pathway to power. And so Trudeau brought a bunch of people in who were so radically left that they left the NDP in the dust, essentially. And they've been running the country on false pretenses for nine years. And if you ally that with the fact that Trudeau is clearly... he clearly has narcissistic personality characteristics and runs the country, I think as a...

• 55:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  what, as a testament to his own grandeur, it's something like that. And one of your caucus members recently stood up in the House and I think listed something approximating 60 scandals. I mean, I've been scandalized by that, because my observation, I've been watching the Canadian political landscape for, you know, five decades, and the Trudeau government has skated through at least a half a dozen scandals that, under normal circumstances, would have provoked an honourable government to resign. And then that doesn't count the other 54. Yeah.

• 56:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  At the moment Trudeau's grip on authority is very shaky. His deputy prime minister resigned last week in a cloud of catastrophic surreal manipulation. He shuffled his cabinet this week, at least a third of his caucus doesn't have any confidence in him. But he's being propped up by the socialists, Jagmeet Singh in particular, who also continually proclaims publicly that he is an opponent of the Trudeau government and is standing up against him while refusing categorically to do anything,

• 56:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  to do the thing that's actually in his power to bring down the government. So, do you want to... I just can't understand this at all. So, do you want to walk us through this?

• 56:55Speaker 00

  Well, let's first of all shed a brief tear for Jagmeet Singh. Because the problem he has is that he's trying to be an NDP leader and we already have an NDP prime minister. I mean, just Trudeau is... He's actually much more radical than the traditional NDP.

• 57:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  As the NDP themselves admit, the previous leaders of the NDP.

• 57:17Speaker 00

  Yes, he attacked the NDP for... Trudeau attacked the NDP for being too conservative.

• 57:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yep.

• 57:24Speaker 00

  But because he had the comfortable blanket of the Liberal Party, which governed for most of the last century, people didn't realize what kind of radical they were dealing with.

• 57:36Speaker 00

  The second problem Jagmeet Singh has is that all of his political ideology is implemented now.

• 57:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, right.

• 57:43Speaker 00

  And we're seeing it. Like, people look around and say, "Okay, this is what it looks like. The utopia the NDP has been spinning in the corner of parliament. They told us everything was going to be free and wonderful and just and there would be..."

• 57:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  Racial equity.

• 57:57Speaker 00

  There would be unicorns and butterflies and rainbows and this would be the utopia. Well, now that all of their policy agenda... Well, all of their agenda is implemented. And people look around and it's a hellscape. You know, we have 1,400 homeless encampments in Ontario, 35 in Halifax. We have hate crimes are up 253% in the last nine years. The military is decimated, wages are dropping, like it's, the list goes on. And so Jagmeet Singh is trying to disown that ideology, even though that it belongs to him.

• 58:39Speaker 00

  And he's trying to make some, trying to unsuccessfully to convince people that he's somehow different than that, when in fact Trudeau has only been doing what Singh would have done in his place. And so it is a classic for socialists. What they try to do is change their names and move on and try to forget, have everyone forget their past. And when I say that he had, socialists changed their names, I mean, you know, they first they were communists and then they became socialist and then they became social democrats and then they became, they stole the world liberal and then they ruined that words, they changed their name to progressives

• 59:23Speaker 00

  and then they changed their name to woke and now they claim they don't want to be called woke anymore. The socialists always try to disown the things they've done because it's manifestly disastrous and that is what Singh is trying to do, while simultaneously keeping Trudeau's government going. He voted just a couple of weeks ago against a non-confidence motion that I put forward, which contains Singh's own criticisms of Trudeau in Singh's own words. He voted against his own words to keep Trudeau in power. But I will remind people.

• 59:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  How do you account for that from a motivational perspective? I mean, the scuttlebutt in the Canadian press is that Singh is propping up the government for personal reasons, say regarding his pension. Now, you're making a much more political case. But I can't understand how he can reconcile himself to himself because what he does is so at odds with what he says that it couldn't be more different. Like, if he allied him... The other thing I can't figure out, maybe you can shed some light on this, is like, when Singh agreed to act as Trudeau's support, why the hell didn't he negotiate a cabinet seat? I mean, why didn't he make it into a formal coalition?

• 1:00:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  I know that's not a traditional Canadian move, but it could happen. And so, he sold his soul to Trudeau fundamentally, decimated his own party, and gained nothing in return, including what he could have gained had he bargained properly. That's how it looks to me. And what do you think about that?

• 1:00:57Speaker 00

  I mean, he's not a very good negotiator, that's for sure.

• 1:01:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:01Speaker 00

  And what we are seeing is the... All of these egomaniacs in both the NDP and what we now call the Liberal Party are turning on each other because they all want to disown their collective record. They... All of them want to say, "Oh, I wasn't part of this." Whether it's the outgoing Finance Minister Freeland or Mark Carney, who's been writing the financial plan behind the scenes, or Jagmeet Singh, they are all trying to say, "I wasn't there, I wasn't part of it, I'm something completely different than what you see." And that is just an illustration of how much of a disaster their agenda has been.

• 1:01:42Speaker 00

  And I think that's why we're doing so well, and we're going to defeat them. And Canadians will give me a mandate to take the country in a completely opposite direction.

• 1:01:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Okay, so what do you see on the horizon in the upcoming year? I want to talk about two things. What do you think is going to unfold, well, even in January, I mean, once Parliament reconvenes? And what you expect from Trudeau in terms of his political action? Then, what you expect... As the Liberal Party tries to reformulate itself, like I can't imagine a scenario, not really, where Trudeau leads Liberals into the next election. That seems to me highly improbable. It wouldn't surprise me if he has to be removed kicking and screaming, so to speak, but I'd like to hear your thoughts on what are Canadians to expect in the upcoming months?

• 1:02:37Speaker 00

  So Parliament's back in late January. It will take some weeks to actually get a non-confidence vote onto the floor of the House of Commons. Then we'll see if Jagmeet Singh's latest promise of voting non-confidence was as insincere as his prior commitments to that effect.

• 1:02:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  When does his pension kick in?

• 1:02:54Speaker 00

  In February. So he's now, basically, he said yesterday that he would put forward a non-confidence motion at the earliest opportunity. Well, that's likely to be March, which is...

• 1:03:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, that's convenient. Okay, so that problem's off. So really, so March is the earliest, as far as you can see, that that election could be called?

• 1:03:16Speaker 00

  Singh will not vote non-confidence before he gets his pension, or at least he will not vote non-confidence in a way that sees the election happen before his pension kicks in. So we won't have an election before very late winter, early spring. Then there's the possibility that the Trudeau resigns and then goes to the Governor General and says, "We need to shut down Parliament," while the Liberal Party then chooses a new replacement, a Trudeau 2.0. And so there would be a leadership race. God knows how long that would drag on for during...

• 1:03:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  You think approximately in March, no earlier than March, as far as you can foresee?

• 1:03:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, probably. And during which time we'd continue to flounder and twist, twist in the wind. And by the way, you know, the Liberal media is all saying, "Well, surely you wouldn't want to trigger an election during the Liberal leadership race." Excuse me, the Canadian people are not obliged, 41 million people are not obliged to wait around while this party sorts out its shit. Like, these guys could have got rid of Trudeau a year and a half ago. They knew he was a disaster then. And now they say, "Well, we're low in the polls, so we have to get rid of him." Now, you didn't care when he was just depriving single mothers of food for their kids, or doubling housing costs, or unleashing crime in neighborhoods across the country.

• 1:04:39Speaker 00

  But now, you're really concerned about getting rid of him because your poll numbers are down and you want to keep your job. Sorry, that's not a good reason to paralyze the entire country, in the face, by the way, of a major negotiation with the incoming US president, who enters with a massive and powerful mandate, and a man who has proven that he can spot weakness from a mile away. So, the country should not be forced to wait for the Liberal Party to clean up its own mess. They've had plenty of time to do that. What we need now is certainty, and the only way that can come is through an election, so the people can decide.

• 1:05:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so, who do you see as contenders on the Liberal side? I mean, Freeland, I think, is going to make a run for it. But Carney, do you think he's going to throw his hat in the ring? Now, he famously rejected the opportunity to become Trudeau's Finance Minister.

• 1:05:35Speaker 00

  After accepting it, after accepting it. Well, so the chronology that we're led to believe, based on sources who've spoken about it to the media, is that Carney agreed to the job. Trudeau went to Freeland, days before she was to introduce her fall update, and said, "I'm going to be firing you to bring in Mark Carney." And then, when that blew up with her unexpected premature resignation, then Carney looked at it and said, "I don't want any part of this." And he crawled under his desk. And so, he was happy to take the job when it looked like it was a clear path. But then, when it was a messier path, he hid from it.

• 1:06:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  But why would he have decided to take that job to begin with?

• 1:06:22Speaker 00

  It's a good question.

• 1:06:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, God, you can't imagine stepping into a more thankless role.

• 1:06:27Speaker 00

  Who would want to associate with these guys?

• 1:06:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, Carney already has a reputation. It seems to me that if he has prime ministerial ambitions, he'd just wait for the Trudeau Liberals to cataclysmically degenerate even further and then step in as the savior.

• 1:06:41Speaker 00

  Look, he's going to try and distance himself now, but here's the problem. He signed on as Trudeau's economic advisor. It's an official role he holds today. Now, he's going to make one of two arguments. One, he's going to say, yes, in fact, I was his economic advisor and therefore I am responsible for the $62 billion deficit and the catastrophic growth, the rising cost of living. Or he's going to say, I wasn't really his advisor, I was just full of it. You know, he has to decide, was he lying to everybody when he claimed he was Trudeau's advisor? Or was he telling the truth? And either way, he's got a major political problem

• 1:07:22Speaker 00

  that he is now totally inseparable from the Trudeau record. He supports the carbon tax, he supports the attack on our energy sector. He told me in a parliamentary committee that he opposed Canadian pipelines, even though his company has invested in pipelines in the Middle East and in Brazil. You know, he is part of the Davos agenda. He's just every bit as radical as Trudeau. The only difference is, he's got a nice banker's haircut and suit, and he wears navy blue socks rather than polka dot socks. But beyond the aesthetics, he shares Trudeau's entire ideology and he represents the status quo.

• 1:08:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, okay. So, what do you see, let's do this. I want to know what you see as, like, frankly speaking, I don't envy you your job. And, or the people, by the way, in the Trump administration, because it's very glamorous at the moment for them. But if they're going to cut government inefficiency in a serious manner, they're going to be doing hard administrative labor for a very long period of time. Now, you're going to take The helm of Canada when there are five dimensions of trouble brewing and serious more serious trouble on all of those dimensions than I've ever seen plague Canada in my entire

• 1:08:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  life as a Canadian and it's worse than that because I suspect that the true picture is a lot more dismal than we know. Yes. Okay, so that's going to be dumped on you sometime in the next year. And so how are you going to deal with that? Like, how are you going to deal with the fact that the easiest thing to do for Canadians and for the remnants of the legacy media will be to wait until the Trudeau government collapses completely, dumps the economic mess on your shoulders, and then two months later proclaim that it's it's your fault. Right. Well, and it will be your responsibility at that point. And so like

• 1:09:29Speaker 00

  They get the party, I get the hangover.

• 1:09:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, you definitely are going to get the hangover. There's no doubt about that. And that's, that's a formidable set of problems. Now, as we've already pointed out, Canada has a tremendous number of natural and cultural advantages. But still, like, there's a lot of now you have a Senate that's packed with liberal progressives. Let's call it call them by their proper name. You have a Senate that's packed with progressives. You have a judiciary that's packed with progressives. You have municipalities all across the country that are progressive. Even once you win, there's going to be a lot of opposition to your movement forward and you're going to inherit all these problems. So like

• 1:10:12Speaker 00

  Are you trying to are you trying to dissuade dissuade me from taking this job?

• 1:10:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so, and so, I mean, I want to know what like, why you think you're, why you think you're ready? Why? And it's been two and a half years since we've had this conversation conversation like this, like, and and what's your, what's your plan? And who are your, who are the people you have in positions to implement your plan? And why do you have, why should Canadians have confidence in them?

• 1:10:41Speaker 00

  So my plan is pretty clear. We're going to, we're going to cut bureaucracy, cut the consultants, cut foreign aid, cut back on corporate welfare to to large corporations. We're going to use the savings to bring down the deficit and taxes and unleash the free enterprise system. We're going to repeal C 69. That's the anti-energy law. To cause a massive resource boom in our country and make it attractive for business to do the value-added work here in this country. So we're going to, part of it's going to be growing out of this mess. You know, if you take a national, the debt to GDP ratio, you have, the denominator has to grow.

• 1:11:25Speaker 00

  And that's why we need a bigger, more powerful GDP that can fund our country and diminish the relative size of our debts. We're going to bring back a monetary discipline to bring down inflation, stop the money printing, and we're going to incentivize the municipalities to get building. But it's going to be a big fight with all of these things because there are so many vested interests that will be trying to hold us back. So many small economic groups that have profited off the status quo, they will be fighting against me and I'm going to have to make, put out a call to Canadians that they have to stay politically active.

• 1:12:10Speaker 00

  They can't assume that simply by changing, by voting in an election that everything is going to, all the problems are going to reverse instantaneously. Like I will need people to put pressure on the Senate to adopt my economic reforms. I will need people to put pressure on their mayors and local councillors to get out of the way and let us build homes. I will need businesses to actually do their part. We are corporate candidates, so completely incompetent when it comes to politics. They're going to have to start to fight for the policies that are good for their workers more aggressively. And I've said that to them, we need to fire their incompetent lobbyists and actually

• 1:12:53Speaker 00

  go to the people and make the arguments for the reforms that I'm talking about.

• 1:12:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  And are the businesses that you're talking to, these are larger businesses, I presume, are they, do they understand your concerns? Are they on board with your suggestions?

• 1:13:08Speaker 00

  They're starting to understand because they know that what they have been doing hasn't worked.

• 1:13:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, the energy companies have been toeing the green line. Which seems to me to be a very bad strategy.

• 1:13:18Speaker 00

  They're idiots. They're complete idiots. The big five oil companies in Canada have idiot lobbyists. They have brilliant workers, credible workers, but idiot lobbyists. And they've been trying to suck up for the last 10 years and did nothing to support the right policies in the prior years. So that's going to have to change. The developers are going to have to inform people in the cities, why housing costs so much? You know, how is it possible that Olivia Chow can raise development charges by 30% and nobody in Toronto knows about it? Well, it's because the builders have not made it known. And so the builders take the blame when the housing costs go up. I mean, sorry, you have to actually...

• 1:14:02Speaker 00

  Politics is a participation sport, not a spectator sport. So our business community is going to have to step up and make the argument for these changes. Or I will come up against a lot of political barriers. So my message to everyone is, God willing, I will triumph in the election. But the people who want the changes that I'm talking about are going to have to stay politically active to push them through and over the finish line.

• 1:14:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  So one of the remarkable things that transpired on the American front, and rather precipitously in the last three months of the election, was that a remarkable team of people aggregated themselves around Trump. And that, well, that was heartening because each of those people had their own track record of stellar accomplishment. But it also helped decrease people's concern about Trump as an individualistic autocrat, let's say. Now, you're very well-known in Canada, I would say, and increasingly internationally. I'd say that's less true of your team. And so, could you tell us, like,

• 1:15:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  can you point to some people who will be key in your administration and highlight their... I'd like to know what you think their strengths are. So let's walk through the core elements of your team. And also, I'd like to hear a little bit about where you think you guys still need to learn and might need further development.

• 1:15:34Speaker 00

  Well, listen, I'll go through some of the names. For example, we've got Andrew Shear, who was the party leader a few years ago. But he actually did a good job as party leader and learned a lot in that process. He was the Speaker of the House, and that's important in a House leader. He knows the rules of the game because a lot of the stuff that gets done or doesn't get done is the result of procedural maneuvers. So you need someone who understands procedure, and he understands it better than anyone. That's why I think our House strategy has been so successful.

• 1:16:13Speaker 00

  One of my former leadership rivals, Dr. Lesley Lewis, is our Shadow Minister of Infrastructure, and she's doing a great job in talking about how we can rebuild the infrastructure of the country. I think we've got newcomers like Jamil Javani, who was recently elected in an overwhelming mandate in Durham.

• 1:16:40Speaker 00

  And Melissa Lansman, our Deputy Leader, extremely well-liked in Toronto, very well-known across the country. She's been a terrific communicator, very smart. So these are very good people, and we're, of course, recruiting a whole army of candidates who are not yet elected in our non-held writings that will help me not just win the election, but govern if, God willing, we do.

• 1:17:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  Who do you have on the energy side federally?

• 1:17:09Speaker 00

  Well, we're kind of lucky in that respect that we have a huge Western caucus, right? We dominate in Alberta and Saskatchewan. So there's very few MPs in our prairie caucus that don't understand energy because they all grew up with it, as you recall from your time as an Albertan. And they know what to do. And I've also planned to, I've talked to Daniel Smith, and I said, "Look..."

• 1:17:37Speaker 00

  And Scott Mo, who's the premier of Saskatchewan, and I said, "Look, you guys need to be ready for when I win, we need your help to reform the approval laws so that we can get some resource projects going, like, immediately." And, you know, I won't speak for her, but Premier Smith from Alberta, who's a fantastic leader, has said she's happy to help, and she knows the energy sector inside out and backwards. And I'm talking to, for example, Greg Rickford from Northern Ontario. He's the guy who's been championing the Ring of Fire, which is all this, the massive collection of minerals in Northern Ontario that we've been talking about mining for

• 1:18:22Speaker 00

  the last 15 years and hasn't been able to get approved. He's the one who's got the plan to approve that. So I've been talking with him a lot, and you'll see more names come forward as we get closer to the election.

• 1:18:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, okay. So your fundamental plan is to eliminate obstacles, let's say, bureaucratic obstacles, procedure obstacles, and to facilitate growth out of Canada's current malaise.

• 1:18:51Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:18:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  And you see that a lot of what you've talked about today is on the resource front. And so, and you have premiers who are going to back that. Canada is also a sophisticated nation. There's, we're more than hewers of wood, let's say, and drawers of water and purveyors of energy. Why don't you talk a little bit about, let's presume, for the sake of argument, that you have two terms, eight years, let's say, which is not an... I think that that's a reasonable prognostication if things go at least moderately well, right? And so, eight years from now, what is the candidate that you are planning to lead?

• 1:19:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  What does it look like?

• 1:19:38Speaker 00

  I think it's a country where any young person can say, "This is the place to start a business. This is the place to take a risk and break through." It's a country where... A country of adventurers, explorers, inventors, workers, people who are extremely ambitious and rewarded for that ambition. It's a place where not only do we graduate brilliant engineers in Kitchener-Waterloo, where we do, some of the best in the world, but they say, "Hell, no, I'm not leaving Canada. This is the place to be. This is where the best tech company is hiring the next 700 people.

• 1:20:21Speaker 00

  This is where I can get the best salary, and this is where I can keep most of my paycheck. Oh, and by the way, it's now affordable for me to buy a home here in Canada." It's a place where...

• 1:20:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  So that's the best rejoinder to the Americans, I would say.

• 1:20:35Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:20:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  Fundamentally, you know, for Canadians who are concerned about undue American influence on Canada, the best possible rejoinder would be to make Canada a place so welcome to entrepreneurs that the US would pale in comparison. That's a tall order, because the Americans are deeply entrepreneurial and have a very business-friendly society, right?

• 1:20:56Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:20:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  At every level, right? They reward entrepreneurial activity.

• 1:21:01Speaker 00

  So I want to see that we, you know, for the first 14 years of this century, Canada had more American investment than America had Canadian investment. In other words, we were winning the tug-of-war of capitalism with the greatest capitalist economy the world has ever seen. And then from 2015 to present, we've, there's been a net outflow of a half a trillion dollars, measured in USD, from Canada to the US. It's astonishing.

• 1:21:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  Since when?

• 1:21:28Speaker 00

  In the last 10 years.

• 1:21:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Half a trillion?

• 1:21:30Speaker 00

  Half a trillion, which is, and that's in American dollars, that's 700-ish billion in Canadian, which is the equivalent of about a quarter of our economy, has just left. It's Canadian investment. I mean, the government admits that the pension funds are now investing in the States. Canadian pension funds, Canadian RSPs, they're all invested, because that's where you get the best return right now. I want to bring that back.

• 1:21:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so that's like $40,000 per Canadian, something like that.

• 1:21:57Speaker 00

  That's right. So why, well, we can bring that back.

• 1:21:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  $20,000, sorry, $20,000 per Canadian, $80,000 per family.

• 1:22:01Speaker 00

  But let's bring it back.

• 1:22:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  Uh huh.

• 1:22:03Speaker 00

  Let's bring it back. Let's make this the best place to get a return on your investment. Let's make this the best place in the world to do business, to bring hundreds of billions of dollars of investment, to dig mines, build pipelines, business centers.

• 1:22:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  Drill.

• 1:22:19Speaker 00

  News tech companies, drill, high-tech enterprises that you not only invent here, but you actually keep here because it's not just a great place to lose money, but a great place to make money. That is the bright, optimistic future I see. I'm looking at models for this. You look at Ireland. Ireland, my grandfather came from Ireland, you know, what, half a century ago because Ireland was too poor. Well, now Ireland's per capita GDP is twice Canada's. They're now $100,000 per capita GDP and Canada's 50,000. So what did the Irish do? They cut taxes, they shrunk government. Government is only 23% of the economy, 40% here.

• 1:23:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right. They made it tech-friendly.

• 1:23:03Speaker 00

  Made it very tech-friendly. It's like 70% of the American, 75% of the Irish economy, excuse me, is free enterprise. And that's why they're just cooking with gas. Look at Singapore, Switzerland. There are countless, Israel after the 90s becoming a startup nation. The recipe book is already written. We know what to do. Unleash free enterprise, remove the constraints, cut taxes, and allow people to prosper.

• 1:23:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, I've heard great things about the tech graduates from the University of Waterloo.

• 1:23:42Speaker 00

  They're phenomenal.

• 1:23:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  People in, the people I know in Silicon Valley. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:46Speaker 00

  They're our biggest export right now.

• 1:23:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, they feel that they're the equivalent, at least, of the graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology. And I mean, the Indians have had a massive influence in Silicon Valley. And so Canadians, well, that's only one place where Canadians are not making nearly the use of their resources that they could. That's on the, on the human resource front with regard to engineers.

• 1:24:09Speaker 00

  Well, you think you graduate from Waterloo and you can pay 53% tax in Canada or 18 or 19 in Texas, you can pay $1.5 million for an average house in Canada, or you can buy a castle for $400,000 in the States. You can make Canadian dollars, which is 69 cent equivalent of the US dollar, or you can make an American dollar. It's unfortunately, there's, the poll is very hard, but we're, why don't we get us pulling in the other direction? Why don't we make this the most attractive place for these brilliant? Minds to come out of these schools and and build it here and keep it here. And I think we can do that.

• 1:24:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so what are you gonna do when you take office? Like, how, what does that look like practically? So what could Canadians, what could Canadians watch you do in the first months of your administration?

• 1:25:04Speaker 00

  Well.

• 1:25:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  That would help reassure them that this is going to happen.

• 1:25:07Speaker 00

  This is real. Well, first of all, I'm gonna ask the carbon tax. It's been kind of an epic commitment that I've made. It's iconic, and so I have to follow through on it immediately. And that will signal to the country that I'm serious. Second, we want to get rid of the GST on new homes. Uh, and make past changes that aggressively incentivize municipalities to get the building started. That has to happen immediately for people to notice any difference in the the cost of housing by the time I get through my fourth year. Um, we will have rapid introduction of the biggest crackdown on crime in Canadian history. A massive crackdown.

• 1:25:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  And what'll that look like, a crackdown on on on crime?

• 1:25:54Speaker 00

  Basically habitual offenders will not get out of jail anymore.

• 1:25:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right. 1% of the criminals commit 65% of the crimes.

• 1:26:03Speaker 00

  Is that right?

• 1:26:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yes.

• 1:26:04Speaker 00

  I didn't know that.

• 1:26:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yes, well, criminals specialize just like everyone else, right? And and the best predictor of offense in the future is repeat offense in the past.

• 1:26:12Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:26:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so.

• 1:26:14Speaker 00

  In Vancouver, they had to arrest the same 40 offenders 6,000 times in one year.

• 1:26:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, that's exactly a consequence of that specialization, right?

• 1:26:23Speaker 00

  When we did this last time in the Harper government, uh, we actually reduced crime by 25%. But interesting, this is a very big surprise, incarcerations went down. Because the people that we kept in prison were in and out anyway. It was like the Hotel California. They were checking out, but they were never really leaving. So we had to basically save them the bed.

• 1:26:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:26:46Speaker 00

  But secondly, the small-time offenders were actually deterred. You know, all of the so-called experts say deterrence don't work. No, they do work.

• 1:26:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, the best deterrent turns out to be probability of conviction rather than length of sentence.

• 1:26:59Speaker 00

  And right now, though, it's.

• 1:27:03Speaker 00

  It's worse than that. Even if you have a probability of conviction, there's a certainty that there won't be any real penalty.

• 1:27:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right. So that's not a real conviction.

• 1:27:12Speaker 00

  That's not a real conviction. So there's going to be a very serious crackdown on crime.

• 1:27:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  Immigration? What's the scoop there?

• 1:27:19Speaker 00

  Oh, we have to slow down the numbers. There's no doubt about it. We have to end the fraud and the international student and the temporary foreign worker program. We have to...

• 1:27:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, Canada historically had a very effective immigration policy.

• 1:27:32Speaker 00

  We just have to get back to the best system in the world, which we had for 150 years. Even in the United States, both Democrats and Republicans used to say, they'd get up in a microphone and claim they were going to replicate our system because it was an undeniable success. Immigration was not even controversial before Justin Trudeau because it was so well managed here for so long. And we just need to get back to that system.

• 1:27:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  It was clearly viewed as a net benefit by the immigrants and by Canadians.

• 1:28:01Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And in fact, the support for immigration was strongest in kind of the rural, resource, and agricultural communities where the labor was most needed and welcomed. And people integrated, they arrived here, and while they were, we said to people, "Look, bring your traditions and culture and your stories, but leave the problems at the door." And so, and this is, by the way, a history for Canada that goes back hundreds of years. I mean, the Protestants and Catholics were ripping each other's eyeballs out in Europe for centuries. And then they came to Canada, and they got along. They ultimately ended up intermarrying and integrating completely.

• 1:28:43Speaker 00

  And, you know, whether you were an Orangeman or an Irish Catholic, over time, you got along with your neighbor. And, you know, in the last nine years, we've seen that's come apart. The foreign conflicts are now spilling onto our streets. I want to put an end to that. I want to say, "Look, we're not interested in the world's ethno-cultural conflicts. We welcome people..."

• 1:29:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's the shadow side of multiculturalism.

• 1:29:15Speaker 00

  We welcome the people who come from places that have been afflicted by war, as long as they leave the war behind. And frankly, that was, most people come here to get away from those things. So... By getting back to a common sense of values and identity. And reminding people that they are, when they get here, they are Canadian first. Canada first. Leave the hyphens. We don't need to be a hyphenated society.

• 1:29:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so we can abandon the post-nationalist state rhetoric and presume that Canada does have a Western identity founded on the a priori principles of Western democracies. And that that is a uniting ethos for the people that come here.

• 1:29:56Speaker 00

  And that we owe a debt of gratitude to the giants who came before us, who fought in wars, who laid down a parliamentary democracy. And who left us behind this incredible inheritance. Yeah, I mean, we're going to be grateful again, and we're going to inculcate the values of gratitude for our incredible history. Build up the country. Celebrate what we have in common, rather than dividing what, obsessing about what divides us. Focusing on the shared values that make us all Canadian.

• 1:30:34Speaker 00

  And I think in so doing, we can, and by the way, put aside race, this obsession with race. That wokeism has reinserted.

• 1:30:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, invented even.

• 1:30:48Speaker 00

  Invented in many ways.

• 1:30:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  When I moved to Toronto, it was as race-blind as any country, as any city could be.

• 1:30:55Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:30:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, and that's flipped. And it's flipped because of that obsessive concern with race. Right, that was something we 100% did not need in Canada. Right, it's, we basically, what would you say? Imported and invented racism in Canada. Right, as a consequence of policy.

• 1:31:15Speaker 00

  Wokeism seeks to divide people into these different groups and subgroups, and we see the results in a 250% increase in hate crimes. But we're going to get back to the basic principle that people are judged based on their individual character and humanity, rather than by their group identity. And that is actually ironically the most unifying thing we can do to bring our country back together. And as Lincoln put it, to bind up the nation's wounds.

• 1:31:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  All right, so we started the conversation with a description of the manner in which the intergenerational compact that makes up the nation had started to become violated or freight, right? You said that young people in particular, you talked about middle-aged people and business people as well, but you said young people felt that even if they did act responsibly and even if they did undertake the adventure of their life, the entrepreneurial adventure of their life, that the probability that they would be successful, even in the centrist, middle-class manner that Canadians had become accustomed to, that had become, what, had an unlikely, that had become an unlikely outcome.

• 1:32:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so your vision, it sounds to me, is to, at minimum, restore that social contract so that young people who are interested in adopting responsibility and taking some risk can be assured that that will meet with success. And you think that you have the team that's in place that can make that possible? Yeah. So what have you, let's close with this. How are you a different person than you were two and a half years ago?

• 1:33:09Speaker 00

  I would say I'm tougher.

• 1:33:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  What does that mean?

• 1:33:13Speaker 00

  Well, it's like you watch a boxing match and you see these guys get hit again and again and again, you say, "How is it that you can take a punch if the average person takes a punch like that on the street? They'd collapse." Well, once you've taken a bunch, you know how to take a punch. And when you run for leader of the oldest and biggest political party in the country and you're trying to change, challenge the vested interests, then you're going to take a lot of punches. And I have, and I've withstood those punches. And as a result, I feel stronger now than I did when I started. I don't feel I have beaten down. I feel emboldened and strengthened from that, running through that gauntlet.

• 1:33:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right. So that has demoralized you?

• 1:33:57Speaker 00

  Not at all, no. In fact, to the contrary, I feel more invigorated than ever before.

• 1:34:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  Why?

• 1:34:04Speaker 00

  Because I think, uh, because I have a mission there, you know, I, um, he was, was it Frankel that said he has a why can withstand any what?

• 1:34:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Anyhow.

• 1:34:16Speaker 00

  Anyhow.

• 1:34:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  Anyhow, yeah.

• 1:34:17Speaker 00

  Um, and I have a why, I know why I am doing this, and I want to get this done for the country, and I want to leave behind the opportunity for every other Canadian, the chance I had as a kid. And, um, I know, I, it's personal for me, you know, I don't come from a privileged or wealthy background. I was adopted by schoolteachers, grew up in a normal suburban neighborhood, we didn't always have money, um, but I was able to get here.

• 1:34:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:34:54Speaker 00

  And my wife's the same story, you know, she came here with nothing, and she's had a great life, her family's had a great life, I love that about this country. And the, the idea that I could restore that as my life's work for other people, to me that is exhilarating, that excites me. If that could be my, the only thing I do with my career, that would be an incredible, incredibly rewarding outcome.

• 1:35:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  All right, right, all right, well, thank you, sir. Um, it's very good to talk to you, hopefully it won't be two and a half years before we speak again.

• 1:35:29Speaker 00

  No, we should do it more often.

• 1:35:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, it's a very good forum for apprising people of, of your plans and your progress.

• 1:35:35Speaker 00

  And also, I, on behalf of all Canadians, want to thank you for your immense courage and the personal political price that you, personal, political and non-political price that you have paid for standing up for your convictions and defending freedom of speech, because I know you have paid a very big price for that, but you have never bent, you have never backed down, you've had a spine of steel, and there are countless other people who will have the freedom to express themselves because you paid the price for them, so thank you.

• 1:36:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, thank you, sir, it's been, it's been a privilege, far more than a price, definitely, and it continues to be that way. All right, so for everybody watching and listening, I'm going to talk to Probably have for another half an hour on the Daily Wire side, as you know, and I think probably what we'll do there is drill down a little bit on Canada-US relations. The DW audience is very American oriented, and so that seems to be perfectly appropriate. And it's something that we didn't cover in any great detail in this, on this side of the conversation, and seems particularly apropos, given that Trump has been making jokes about Trudeau being the governor of the 51st state, and has also threatened to put 25% tariffs on Canada, which I think is more of a ploy than a genuine threat, but it's definitely

• 1:36:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  something that needs to be discussed. And so, we'll talk about the trials for Canada of having the Americans as their southern neighbor, but also the immense opportunities that go along with that. So, well, we occupy the same continent, so it'd probably be best if we got along, you know, swimmingly. So, that's what we'll discuss on the Daily Wire side, so be more than welcome to join us there. Thank you again, sir.

• 1:37:19Speaker 00

  Thank you.