Justin Trudeau and the Election that Should Have Never Been | Rex Murphy | JBP Podcast S4: E45

if the result of this election comes that at the end of this exercise in which he exposes so many people the liberals return with the minority what was the point of this and what happens if the result is let's be generous to him the liberal government is returned in a minority position so we're two years in 400 billion deficit no one wanted the election you can't tell me what it's about and at the end of it we're in the same spot is this a country or is this some sort of playground [Music] i'm pleased today to be able to discuss the canadian political landscape with mr rex murphy rex is a journalist extremely well known to canadians he was a regular host of cbc radio 1's cross-country checkup a nationwide call-in show for 21 years before stepping down in september 2015 i spoke with rex about his career on and various other matters june 3rd 2021 a few months ago and that video has accrued about 800 000 views it's been very popular and i read one of rex's columns about uh our prime minister justin trudeau a couple of days ago and then watched the leaders debate and it struck me that it would be a really good time to talk to him again about all about a variety of things but obviously most importantly for canadians the current election uh so we're going to talk about the election it's wise and where force we're going to talk about the leaders and we're going to talk about the debate and so thanks very much rex for agreeing to talk to me today i'm really looking forward to hearing what you have to say about all this let's start with the election so what's going on why was this election called what's it about that is the key question of this election and it has been the key question from the very first moment and for we're in the fourth week now by the way for the benefit of listeners and for the first couple of weeks it it actually threatened to become the issue of the election in other words the so-called ballot question which is how the experts talk of this will be why did you call the election well here's something here's background and it's necessary to have this background mr trudeau has been in office for two years he's received the mandate just two years ago or less he's had one of the most comfortable runs as a minority he won a minority as a minority prime minister that anybody has ever had now it's true we were visited by covet but this this arranged two dynamics first of all mr trudeau and the ndp which is the supporting party have obviously reached some great accord so mr trudeau has had no no real challenge in administering his parliamentary or executive functions and secondly with the arrival of the pandemic in particular this gave great license for abrogating or staying away from or diminishing the active uh and full role of the parliament itself so two things a very comfortable alliance with the ndp and the bloc when the occasion demanded it and secondly because parliament was effectively eviscerated or gutted it was closed down the sessions were limited uh committees folded mr trudeau himself stayed away from parliament all his major announcements for a single year by the way totaling 400 billion dollars into deficit imagine a minority politician o'toole o'toole said during the debate that the trudeau government is borrowing 500 million dollars a day yeah is that can that possibly be true i can't do the mental derivative but if you talk about 400 billion then obviously and we have it now we have a debt that's the deficit a debt uh some recorded at 1.3 trillion and one of the public officers who accounts for canada's finances is saying that it may not be paid off until 2070 and at which point it will all have totaled something like 3 trillion now when he called the election i'm giving you all these things that he had an un on on hindered hand in racking up the largest amounts of public spending since the confederation began he didn't have to face parliament to any degree like other prime ministers because again closed down all these announcements came from the steps of his cottage and on the day i get into your question on the day he called the election the justification offered that day and this is why i wanted to start here was that he was meeting so much obstruction in parliament and i said to myself my holy lord you know you could combine his father john even bigger lester pearson than john a macdonald put them all in one man and they wouldn't have had anything like the ease the control and the absolute dominance of the parliamentary function the committees were dissolved the accountability people didn't have enough funds the auditor general asked with all this money going out the window i need more people to keep it checked there was no money from the auditor general even as you spent 400 billion dollars we are not the us that's the deficit and he made a pledge in 2015 that by 2019 the deficit of canada would be gone we would have a balanced budget so let's start with that one the reason i'm calling this election is that the opposition is obstructionist and i cannot get my way through that was so palpably so so absolutely adamantly empty as a reason the real reason and a lot of them is that during that period the polls were showing that because of all the money flowing out canadians have never received directly so many dollars before and that despite let me go back to this despite his initial stumblings and there were many over this pandemic and scandals nonetheless he was very popular versus mr rotu so there was a hope of a majority and now i wind this little section down but it's a very important thing to ask the hope of a majority said to his advisors and him okay we have two full years left we have an extremely compliant parliament no other prime minister has had as easy as us however if we went now we might get a majority and there are only two reasons why you would throw away two years of an already established mandate for the hope of four years on a gamble the one is the polls the second is this this is the deeper one for me anyway and i'm not a conspiracy guy all that money going out not being properly accounted for parliament not exercising its functions is it possible that the trudeau government is really really worried that when the pandemic slows down and people return their attention to the administration of government and how and where these huge amounts of money went and how they were supervised how well they were administered who received them i think there was a fear that if he remained in minority as and the pandemic reduced the pressure so that the parliament could resume its function the press could get off the one topic and they would start to look at the record of that spending how it was decided who established their priorities and on top of all of that of course we get into those he said as you know a rain rain a rain of scandals during this particular period and maybe he thought an election could kind of wash that off him but it was called for only one reason to secure a majority for the next four years now how that's going we will talk about it well it seems like a strange gamble to take if if your initial supposition is correct too which is that he was essentially um leading a de facto majority government because of the unconditional support of the ndp so it seems strange to throw that away if that's been functioning i mean it's going to tilt the liberal policy to the left to some degree but i can't imagine that that's really that big a problem for for mr trudeau you're pinpointing what is again to me the this is the unanswerable question he realized this is not the partisan observation everyone will tell you this parliament rarely met it meant only in in zoom calls uh the press had to stand every morning outside the cottage the normal scrutinies the normal dynamics the internal committees all of this was abruptly just gone with at the same time at the very same time there was a motion made by the then finance minister that he wanted the the the the minority government to have the authority to expend monies for two years is that made up without parliamentary approval that shocked even them and that was denied however because of as i say the closet arrangements between the bq and the ndp whenever he wanted to shovel out 6 billion here 10 billion there 4 billion there up to 400 billion yes okay so let me let me play devil's advocate here a bit so we could say mr trudeau said he would have canadians backs desperate times require desperate measures uh canada is rich enough to afford this large yes so why not open the pumps and and flood people with money while they're in this crisis situation what do you see as the benefits of that say but also the long-term medium and long-term dangers well in any crisis i mean like the 208 recession uh prime minister harper released more money than the prime minister harbor would normally do however you see there's there's a double problem with this particular sure you have to respond to the pandemic but some of the responses are very far from the actual problem that they're dealing with secondly and this this this is a very crucial thing the pandemic had a second dynamic it shut down all of the businesses service things hotels taxis construction projects schools everything is shut down and the economy of canada during the last year and a half to two we haven't got the measure of it it has taken a devastating a devastating and a savage hit so at the very period that your economy is actually unmeasured because we're not having the measurements done hitting a a crater we're shooting a deficit uh past uranus and there's no one the parliamentary budget officer can't get the thing they ought to the general can't get the press and this great flood of money keeps everybody happy so the normal again the the accoutrements of parliamentary oversight and accountability are not there it was a flood let's continue the discussion with regards to what this election is about and i watched the debate last week and when i was about halfway through watching it i had this idea which was the the responses that the leaders that all the different leaders of the federal parties had to the questions that isn't really where the debate was being won or lost the debate was won or lost before it even started and the reason for that was because of the topics that were chosen and so let's look at that let's look at the debate from from as a as a as a what would you say as an entity in itself forget about the content the first thing that happened was that there was a land acknowledgement indigenous land acknowledgement and so that you know i've seen those things happen over and over and they always make me wonder it's like well who decided that every important occasion in canadian life political life was going to be signified by one of these land acknowledgments and who to who who benefits from them and what do they really mean and what are they setting us up for and so i would say regardless of their intrinsic merit it's certainly the case that the idea of indigenous land acknowledgement and that that should precede every discussion of import is a progressive idea and so what that means is the debate is framed instantly from the perspective of the progressives and then you look at the structure of the debate you have the ndp left green party left liberals left and you have the lone conservative aaron o'toole and then you have the choice of questions and i found this so imagine that the most significant piece of information that emerges from the debate is not how the leaders responded but what the questions were because if i wanted to ask a leader something i'd say well what do you think the most pressing issues facing canadians are and then i'd like to hear the answers but i'd like to know what are the questions what are the issues and then by participating in this debate as it was structured aaron o'toole the the putative conservative seeded the uh conceptual territory so that half the debate was taken up on climate change and reconciliation and only a quarter of it on affordability of all the observed topics that means the economy that means the entire the entire business of governance and so it's so strange to see us framing our entire national discussion in this haphazard ad hoc way that that that brings a set of presuppositions to the table before the debate even starts and and to see no one object to that it's like is co is climate change really that crucial a crisis right now i can tell you first of all i got to agree with one very big point this conceptual point when you set these things up as you say with a ritual invocation uh obviously from the book progressive side you've said the prayer of glad to acknowledge but you're back in some sort of progressive church so now you've established the ethos and the atmosphere and then and you're absolutely correct i'm not saying that just the vision if if they caught under the debate the selection of what is to be talked about is the debate yes absolutely we should say that over and over we should say that over and over the selection of what to talk about is the debate yeah so it's lost to begin with by the way now to get to a particular the climate change i think you you timed it with something like 26 minutes in quebec in quebec uh there was a poll on yesterday of the seven main issues in quebec the seventh issue the seventh the seventh was climate change if you go down to newfoundland and you try to tell someone down there that climate change is the number one issue they'll throw you off a wharf how about albertans albertans if you go out there and tell them that the ruined nation of alberta and that the war against it's it's it's it's central and abiding industry and the threat of taking all the oil workers off their jobs and sending them out to mold windmills i was out in alberta just a week ago alberta stopping there alberta should be a topic of the debate how has it been treated in the last 10 years the elimination of the pipelines the the niagara of of obstruction and protest over a legitimate industry and the demonization of a single province there are no demonstrations against china venezuela russia any of the oil-producing countries one probably arabs one province in one country is attacked by its own and mr trudeau when he opens his mouth without the usual guards speaks about oh we can't close the oil industry tomorrow instead go back to your point climate change gets set up in that thing as if it's a mobile block that the science is a single word okay i want to talk a little bit more about that too i could go ahead people should be warned about this okay so i was thinking more about climate change is that there is no conceptual difference from a governance perspective between the terms climate change and the terms global governance and here's why it's because climate is the entire planet it's every system in the planet and change doesn't mean change it means existential crisis to paraphrase the green leader anime paul so think about what we're doing canadians think about what we're doing we're taking this phrase climate change we conceptualize it as a problem then we conceptualize it perhaps as a crisis all right and then we're ceding administrative power to governmental officials who parade their commitment to climate change as a high moral virtue and then they can say they can point to any piece of evidence they want that supports the crisis nature of the climate change and that's always going to be there a flood a drought fire hurricanes that proves that climate change is not only real but it's an instant existential crisis and that you're immoral if you don't put it at the top of the list and because it means global governance you essentially seed all your moral authority and all your uh policy-making power to any government that wants to do anything they want as long as they use climate change as a justification and that should worry environmentalists too because what that does using that catch-all buzz phrase which really means global governance and nothing else is that it obscures the attempts of anybody serious to deal with micro problems of the environment that could actually be solved exactly it's a terrible thing this this well it's not i could link it by the way i don't think this is at all a far-fetched idea we're we're we're being heard in some degree under the uh the the demands of the of the pandemic itself were becoming more relaxed in in the suspension or the abridgement or the abandonment of some of our normal legitimate democratic functions and i i see that the the pandemic in certain ways is almost a preparatory course yes that once once you build a habit oh well this by the way but people's health is sacred so you really can't object to us moving into this terror if you have a good enough cause you can build up the administrative state to heights never seen before but you know what climate change climate change is the perfect excuse it's the perfect excuse for that and you can see and you'd say well climate change is a terrible catastrophe and all of that says well i'm i've interviewed bjorn lomberg a number of times and if you want an intelligent discussion about the dangers he's saying and and the the thing about lombard too is he cares he's environmentally a minded person he does his cost-benefit analysis with the input of the best economists in the world and he'll take a look at a country his team takes a look at the country and says well first of all let's specify the problems that face us rank order them and then rank order them again in terms of how we can spend money the most efficient way to to make progress on these areas they do it they have they have a policy generating apparatus an analytic apparatus that does that now if you want good information about the climate i think lomberg is a a reliable source it it we can't overstate the danger of precisely what you said and we both sound increasing like like a couple of conspiracy theorists and that's a terrible thing i mean you're you've been a mainstream journalist forever and a very reliable one but it is definitely the case that we are getting accustomed to the seeding of our civil liberties and as you pointed out as long as the reason is good enough and you're immoral for even objecting to the fact of the reason then you're dead in the water to begin with and this is happening to the conservatives all the time and and they don't object and it's true two points to come out of this i go back to your let's say before this particular period to your main talks uh three and four years ago one of the aspects of our current culture is that a set of managerial or clerical minds the bureaucrats the academics the walk they've given themselves or arrogated to themselves the right to determine when a topic is finished and when it is not and the earliest indication of so-called cancel culture and i think the most damning one goes back to al gore goes back to 2001 and academy awards that once this global warming and aka climate change aka global weirdie once it became a big international political ball the line was the science is settled in other words our version of what this thing is but much more importantly the measures that we are saying are necessary get folded into that's the crucial thing that's the crucial thing they're trying to tell you in advance you can't argue the main point my difficulty with mr o'toole in that debate goes exactly again to your understanding mr o'toole is sliding along with that one if he really believes that climate change is existential and that alberta has to rip up its own economy let them say it i would much rather see someone in opposition who said i haven't fully accepted that this apocalyptic menace that you've been peddling for 25 years is an established thing and i certainly don't accept that i can't argue with you over the proposals that come out of it but on that debate everyone had to be holy and everyone watch your climate change plan there is no plan in canada to stop a world event it's it's it's people not only that it isn't obvious it's by no means obvious that we know how to stop it anyways and it certainly isn't clear that we know what measures should be taken i mean the americans have actually decreased their carbon output i think it's 14 over the last 10 years why fracking now you find me one progressive who bloody well predicted that and that's that's see you made the point exactly right is that people jump up and down about climate change and they say the science is settled and you're a flat earth or a backwards son of a if you don't agree with it but that is just a proxy for their claim that i know how to deal with it and these policies all of which just happen to be progressive are the only means by which this can possibly be redressed and that is not only patently untrue it's it's quite clear to me that in all probability the cure is going to be far greater than the disease oh absolutely you well i can't take this take canada at the present minute we're reading the election again the fact that there has the true to a government in particular because uh flying virtue flags is about the only exercise they know how to do perfectly climate change global warming saving the world the cop meetings the ipcc this this is this is to justin trudeau his idea of the eucharist and he hired one of the most most adamant intense climate activist ever gerald butts to be his principal man this is the key big idea and it's obsessional ritualistic and in turtle's case possibly even religious yes i agree that it's i agree it that it's religious i one of the things i've been thinking through psychologically most recently is the it's the psychological ramifications and the political ramifications of the old new testament statement to render unto caesar what is caesar's and unto god what is god god's and the problem seems to me to be psychologically is that once you stop rendering unto god what is god so you you muddy up the religious domain you remove it then all sorts of things that shouldn't become that shouldn't be religious become religious there's no getting rid of the instinct it just transfers to something else and this save the planet mentality well you're landing on it your land acknowledgements are are a ritual token exactly by the way exactly even the fact that the nation's flag is at half staff i don't know now for how many weeks yep yeah that's another religious by the way our flag is at half-mast during an election and we haven't even mentioned afghanistan but i must go back one more quick point on the cost of global warming politics you've estranged the entire western provinces there is so there is real anger there is real passion and there are certainly this enchantment that alberta a full vigorous helpful province that provided jobs for half of canada during a recession is now being targeted because global warming as the mandarins of ottawa and montreal and toronto and the news media they want to be holy on this one as well alberta has become a leper state it's a pariah and pete we're risking our own confederation because of the obsessions of some of these high-class ideologues who who do not know reality yes well we could think broadly speaking even in terms of the of the future security of the west as a whole it's like the americans should be buying oil from canada and not from the arabs obviously and all that's going to happen if we shut down the alberta industry apart from the unbelievable economic damage that it's going to do and the alienation to that province and the catastrophic stupidity that's involved is to cede more power to states that have held us over a barrel so to speak a barrel of oil since 1971. it's like you saw what happened to germany when they became overdependent on russia for for for their petroleum resources yeah it's like we just it's like we're being we're we're being run by by naive moralistic children you talked about this academic codery you know of people who are holier than thou i really found that characteristic of anime paul the green leader she reminds me of everything that i detest about academics the worst academics and there's this moral superiority combined with this absolute certainty that a particular kind of intellectual approach is so much superior that anyone who would dare to question it has to be both ignorant and malevolent you're seeing that also in this election now i mean mr trudeau goes around like a spin top he's now onto this this thing about vaccination and that if you if you have a disposition or a set of arguments i'm not getting into the vaccination debate as vaccination people who have from civil liberties from the mistrust they have certain institutions they're they're now anti-vaxxers in other words their climate deniers you see we're getting camps and he's really coming down on that but this comes as you yeah he said that he wouldn't he he had no sympathy for him no sympathy yep it's so it's so interesting to see because you you know a leader should be in some sense agnostic about such things i would say i talked to john anderson who was used to be the deputy prime minister of australia about covet policy and this is something we talked about i'd like your thoughts on it so this is obviously just a sketch of proposal so we have all these vaccines and we've we've and i'm vaccinated by the way i have two vaccinations so i'm not saying that because i'm proud of it or anything like that i just that's what i did and if people don't want to do it there are people in my family who don't want to get vaccinated it's like that's that's your right it's a fundamental right i would say guaranteed by the u.n among other organizations the right to refuse medical treatment in any case so we have all these vaccines and hypothetically they're for everyone's benefits so you say look you have until december 15th to be vaccinated we're opening everything up then and it's on you we're gonna increase icu spending in case you get sick in case they have unvaccinated get sick we still going to take care of you but we think the vaccines are effective and they're available to you and and we can't risk any more damage to the economy like anderson's comment was well we've been letting doctors physicians for example of a certain stripe let's say drive political policy without paying any attention whatsoever to the to the burgeoning economic cost of this what are we going to see rex are going to see a massive return of inflation in the aftermath of this when the economy this is it peters i think that's that's again go back right to the very beginning why this election apart from the vanity of perhaps getting his majority that the consequences of the last two years of policies that have been enacted the various positions that have been taken and by the way to multiple confusions from the beginning we're going to start seeing some of that and then when the pandemic finally lives and the economy is revealed as the rubble it has become the anger out there that we may have done all of this and it may not have been either the most efficient or even the most correct and in the meantime we've bankrupted the entire national treasury there is an awful wind coming down from the north over the next year or two and that wind would have been too strong once it gets to the violent peak that it would for his minority government arrangement to sustain itself he needs a majority i'm thinking of the damn the damn throwing chain of buzzard the game of thrones he needs his ice wall of a majority government to stay there for the next four years by the way here's another little subtext this is very interesting we're having an election he summoned all the people of canada almost 40 million in the middle of a pandemic in which social contact is governed and distancing and masking but he has called an event together most multitudes that you possibly could in the middle of the damn pandemic to discuss the pandemic and if he re if the result of this election comes that at the end of this exercise in which he exposes so many people the liberals return with the minority what was the point of this and what happens if the result is let's be generous to him the liberal government is returned in a minority position so we're two years in 400 billion deficit no one wanted the election you can't tell me what it's about and at the end of it we're in the same spot is this a country or is this some sort of playground well it looks it it let let me ask you a question too about the topics of the debate again because i want to hit that over and over the fact that that territory was seated to begin with people really have to understand this is that the topics are the debate because that tells what everyone says is important okay so reconciliation we haven't talked about that yet took up a tremendous chunk of the debate that's in the middle of the pandemic and during the initial phases of what's likely to be an economic crisis okay so so one of the things the debate should have been about as far as i can tell in a serious way is the covet shutdown it's like we need an array of opinions about exactly what do you do you want to stay locked down everyone like what sort of risk are we willing to take and that's so that in my way of thinking that was the number one topic and this affordability issue is also so comical it's like we're the people who put the top debate topics together so ignorant about the way that reality is structured that they believe that shoveling every bit of the discussion about the economy into one 20-minute section of the debate under the heading affordability that that wasn't appropriate conceptually because isn't that reminiscent of trudeau's statement that he isn't interested in monetary policy isn't that the same thing revenue but think about it for a second i underline a different way i've said twice or three times we have a 400 billion dollar deficit it's historic a 1.3 trillion dollar debt it's historic brought in by a prime minister who then announces is 400 billion 1 trillion 3. i don't think about monetary policy put those two together this this is this this is so much a disjunctive anyone who you could only have someone who doesn't know what monetary policy is not worry about these things and money is there to be printed or thrown out it's what i see that's what i see conceptually in the structure of the debate it's like oh well just that all that kind of detailed nonsense that's for lesser minds we'll just shovel that under affordability and we'll donate 20 minutes to it because we know how important can that possibly be compared to uh well well on that debate there's one that i'd like you to consider this election was called as i said in the middle of a pandemic but it also happened on the same day and i really like your opinion on this and on the same hour almost that an episode in afghanistan it took 20 years and in the case of some of our soldiers well over a decade 158 did so many wounded families we had honor trips we had journalists going to afghanistan we made pledges to the girls and women feminism was going on and when the day that it shuts down and the taliban walk in and nullify and canadian citizens are stranded and fixers and interpreters that work with our soldiers and our journalists are there and he calls an election boris johnson was the next day re-summoned parliament do you realize how little debate we've had on an issue i was at the journal at the national for this the amount of coverage of the canadian soldiers in afghanistan and what they were doing and what they were suffering in the hall the the the the highway of heroes the great boost the trip still and suddenly it's just not there why why is not the government saying to the mothers and fathers of those veterans that lost their lives to the soldiers who were there we now wish to speak to you you gave us 11 years of living life and it's just it turns to a nullity i must direct some of my political advice or or or or understanding to you because you must be sitting there saying why did i go over there what about myself that i can't get back okay okay so let's take a brief foray in that direction i mean i've been watching to some degree i'm certainly no expert well i'm no expert in any of this that's for sure i'm just watching with my jaw gape fundamentally the state department the u.s keeps sending out missives that are sort of reminiscent of our our federal cabinet ministers comment about the taliban being our brothers it's like they're surprised they seem surprised that they seem to expect that the taliban would first of all abide by some sort of like quasi-progressive international standards that they would have something resembling an inclusive government which which meant including women and for example just just to begin with that they would act like antibiotics people who were completely unlike the taliban and now and now with that that isn't happening which everyone could have predicted with absolute certainty the the state department seemed to be those of surprise it's like well this isn't what we expected it's and so i would presume that that that sort of thinking must have permeated the trudeau cabinet or looks like it because otherwise why would she say such a thing or are they pretending you you ha you'd have to be you would have to be a b truck not to know what taliban is like and if you look even even yesterday even yesterday i saw pictures of two journalists they were stripped to the waist and their legs were bare and they were striped with awful stripes you saw another woman getting savagely beaten uh you see now that they've divided the roles you know that this is a fundamentalist tyrannical barbarous government but what upsets me and what i think should be or almost not almost morally in this election we made a moral commitment which we didn't have to make but if you make them you better hang on to them and we talked so loud and so proudly of what canada canada's back was doing for all these wretched people in afghanistan who had suffered but now we're building schools and we're building water stops and we were and some of the canadians i met many canadian soldiers coming back you know they were so happy that they were doing something for people less well-off and when the whole enterprise collapses the next speech the next day is we're going to send 500 million dollars to seniors do you not speak to the biggest foreign policy issue of the last 10 years involving the most respected institution in this country which is its military and go to your point on a debate and we only have one in english you don't have afghanistan on it at all can you yeah well that's military policy that's another one of those sort of messy details you know that that people who are high-minded don't ever give any consideration to especially not when we can have discussions about global salvation and climate change and that climate change is lovely too for for people who who can speak who who want to speak in what would you call them impressive cliches because it isn't an actual problem in that it's an actual problem has to be conceptualized as small enough in some sense so that you could hypothetically take action that would have a fairly determinate outcome right so you have to break it down into a a problem that's manageable very very difficult thing to do with when you're talking about something like climate change which involves i'm going to fix the world's weather yeah yeah exactly what i'm going to retool i'm going to retool energy policy globally it's like really are you you really you can't even you don't even know how your car works here's here's the test and this is a really good one and i think it's extremely pertinent i wrote a little thing not because i wrote it i wrote a little thing i believe you on climate change and i believe you have the technical expertise to do it and i believe that canada can actually be the fundamental lever to change the climate of the world but first i'm on a small demonstration you promised that we wouldn't have any boil water advisories on a number of localized indigenous reserves these are small projects environmental projects too when you think about them tell you what when every single oil advisory is canceled and when the water on all the reserves is completely safe and the promises you have made for 30 years on this minuscule problem minuscule in comparison to global warming then bring in your global warming agenda the problems they can deal with they depart from the problems that they know they can't handle they're more than willing to talk forever about them and they're all in 2050 or 2075 or 21 20. they like the problems 50 years out the one up north and the promise made in 2015 that these advisories would be over that's just well that's a problem we could solve so obviously we're not going to give us the ones we can't so let's talk a bit about this reconciliation issue too because that was one-fifth of the debate and so um the the basic proposition is something like the the indigenous people of canada have had uh uh hard time historically speaking and uh the federal and provincial governments have been complicit in that and by extension all those who are part of that governmental structure and and and fair enough and and but then i was listening and and i have some familiarity with native culture not not a lot and some real sympathy for people who survived the worst of the residential schools and i know someone i'm very close to someone who was brutalized beyond comprehension in such a system it was it's appalling what happened to him and to people like him but then i didn't hear any straight talk about the reserves themselves and and i'm going to go way out a limb here but you know that's what you do i think if you're you want to address these things with some amount of content most of the reserves that i'm familiar with are like small towns that's the closest analogy and if you go out west for example and you see this all across north america all the small towns have dried up all of them there's hundreds and hundreds of basically abandoned small towns in saskatchewan and so what's the long-term economic viability of these small town reserves is anybody ever going to talk about that because there is none as far as i can tell even hypothetically how is it possible for that system and structure to survive and if we don't address that in something like a national debate that's focused on reconciliation which i think is the elephant under the rug it's like why in the world should we assume that we're any more honest than the ants our ancestors who were continually apologizing for yeah so am i way out of line there like well again you you've hit climate change is one this is not false this is actually the case climate changes is one of the sacred topics for 85 percent of journalists politics uh your consultant class you're not supposed to go to the center to think in other words why would you want to close close down uh alberta but you want to criticize china that's logic in the case of the indigenous issues in this country i don't have anything like the amount of knowledge you have and even if yours is scant but i do know this that if you if you wish to talk about indigenous affairs there's already a structure there's already a set of attitudes you're only supposed to speak in a certain direction and especially if you're a white journalist wants to comment on it at all this is already surrounded by a number of media taboos you can't put topics off limits and then demand the change it's again it's like the global warming debate i would like to see finally some people of genuine disinterest disinterest high intelligence and perfect credentials with no ties to anything else but science give me a reading in the case of the indigenous reserves i it's the same in not it's a parallel in newfoundland we have the small outports collapsing because the economy is dying over the last five or six years there is no way in the world that these towns that lasted for so so long can live any longer now you're not allowed precisely to ask that question in the current context and so the debate is not only crippled it's stealthified from the beginning so what that means is that the whole reconciliation exercise is going to end up being a show being nothing but another pack of lies well they remember again the tremendous inquiry missing women and did you and murdered women that was that was supposed to be a great opening of the doors and the final effort it becomes something else we had the tremendous parliamentary apology when uh harper was prime minister in which the leaders women and male of the aboriginal were in the house account that was supposed to be a significant constitutional moment it meant that okay we can abandon the structure of hostility under which we're talking and now we can bend our minds to the future and to the actual fixing of the physical things that need to be done however as soon as the great glory and the ceremony was over and it was a formal parliamentary apology we're still having apologies will people wake up and see that this is just form this is the genuflection in the church this is another one of those rights that we go through not substance send send 200 civil servants with engineering degrees to these places if it's just the water problem and i cannot believe in the 21st century you can't get the the wells clean or the streams dried and yet we talked about that in 2015 and you're talking about it in 2021 so when you hear reconciliation or new understanding or a land acknowledgement that's the kind of spiritual tax that you pay because you don't do anything and so do you think that my analogy between the the at least a sizable proportion of the reserves and the doomed small towns across canada does that seem accurate to you then there's the problem of of endemic alcohol abuse which no one will talk about and i'm not pointing a finger in blaming i mean not at all and i come from an isolated northern community and i know what that's like but it's like we are children we can't have a serious discussion about these things it's like okay there's a terrible problem yeah well terrible problems are really hard to talk about just exactly what is the problem that's this is the mark of current sculpture and civilization and media you have crime problems in toronto what's the solution ban long-range we know it's not ban long rifles we know that there are thugs with handguns that they get from the states they are in specific quarters of these cities we have had this gun argument unrelated to the actual facts of the case because if you cite those facts specifically you will be hounded with all sorts of the new anatomists of racism and home whatever the particular cause is if you bring up the actual items that give great disparity to native peoples in this country all of them then you will be under attack for something else again it is a mark of western discussions in western politics that we have a in we have a an automatic and silent cancellation mechanism here's the amount of intelligent remark which will permit in an open room and by the way so many people who make these little discussions and have these grand conferences they know they are empty from the beginning because they know they're not saying 90 of what they know and it goes to other issues too it goes to teaching in school the trans movement uh the idea that this is this special services guy yesterday 180 pounds or something strangled some woman and no one will stand up and say you know something you're mad you're crazy and the idea we let a special service service and you're sadistic and you're sadistic and you're narcissistic and you're a man who just beat the hell out of a woman and is bragging about it yeah but this is but it's an index i'm going to use an exact it's an index of this curious bending of the mind the the shutting down of three quarters of the processes of the mind to accommodate woke culture political correctness where in the last interview we had the more calm one we were throwing away the intellectual credibility and integrity of western thought and it finally rolled you can see so yeah you look at look at see what's happening just watch as that as that continues to deteriorate we're going to have debates structured like the one we just saw where we we seed the territory right from the beginning and we don't even notice and there are no tools if he were a real opposition leader instead of going along with the group here he would have stood in the middle when his turn came and said i've seen the debate function and i've seen the list of questions here uh they're all off uh you're not dealing with the separate ones i disagree with the format i think make the case challenge the assumptions but no no i've seen this i've seen this time and time again with conservatives they they don't notice when they've been beat to begin with and they won't object and a lot of its terror a lot of its terror about being singled out and mobbed and like this this this incursion of morality into the political domain is really hard on people because it is hard to be singled out and mobbed and it is hard to be pilloried for your immorality just because you're trying to think but it's also subtle you know it took me till halfway through the debate till i realized that oh i see this was lost on the center on the right and on the right this was lost to begin with of course it was who cares what anyone says it's it's like you already agreed to the terms of the conversation and that bigger point about the debate is something else as i've noted there were two in quebec and one one we are a democracy of 40 million people 10 provinces three vast landscape and there are in my judgment there are five separate mentalities or maybe six of canada the atlantic region quebec has its own obviously ontario you understand the prairies bc is its own place the north and other things there there are no there's no possible reason in a national election that you don't at least visit five of the separate regions and have the local people in those regions but as an audience and as a panel tell the politicians what the issues are instead we've shrunk it to one little tiny thing with a gallery of the most cases the usual journalists we cram four and five leaders three of whom shouldn't be there the debate itself was negatory it was audios it was empty we need much more we're allowing politics to be managed by the politicians and the journalists and this election is one of the most cynical i've ever seen so let's talk about the leaders let's say okay also about the about the sort of stunning absence of maxine bernier i mean you have the person that i was most impressed with i would say in the debate all things considered was probably the block quebecois leader much as i hate to say that i mean there's lots of his policies that i find rather um well let's say not in the best interests of canadians per se but i mean he makes no bones about that so but he was the only person who i saw in that whole debate sort of hold his own against the moralizing of the journalists yeah and also who who dared at least upon occasion to to say what he thought and it was the rest of it seemed to be to be an exercise in not stepping on a mine something like that and exercising not saying anything that was going to cause trouble or so um anime paul it was strange that she had it's a strange thing to see her discuss on equal footing in some sense with the prime minister and and the leader of the opposition that that's a that's a very strange thing because she doesn't have the political support to justify that and i know that's hard it's hard to figure out who to include in these leadership debates or not but that was another example of seeding the territory in a terrible way so well there's two things i'd like to say about it but that particular one green is another religious subject so it's a lot harder uh from the point of view of correctness to keep up the green person but the biggest objection to anime paul not on our person at all is that we've seen in the last two and three and four weeks uh that her her green party is essentially a live grenade uh busily destroying itself and the idea that the leader of a party that is obviously in self self dissolution gets to stand up uh in the full leaders debate that's comical she's a nice woman she's very smart a couple of really good lines but what is this party of two of which she is not the one in the house in the house of parliament doing eating up the time on the stage we should have debate between leaders who can become prime ministers and secondary debates among those who aspire and they should be canada-wide and they should not be limited to one english debate with about 400 people on stage this is really a folly and as far as you get she's there but elizabeth may is still whatever she's doing she is still the green party and the green party is now more and the israel than it is pro-earth so tell me let's okay do you have anything else that you wanted to say about the about the debate we really really haven't talked anything about the content eh about about what the various leaders actually had to say on each of these topics well just one more thing on the debate in canada over the years we have allowed the actions of politics to become so professionalized uh it used to be an amateur effort you'd round up your buddies and you'd do all this campaigning even a year in advance now you have the consultants the strategy teams the experts hired from down in the states you've got people who make a living just running political campaigns you have the tv consultants and the fashion consultants and it's all some great glorious meeting of these very brilliant and and yuppie uh fixtures but as far as going out and saying oh i think i'll take three check justin oriano too uh really i'll drop the goddamn entourage i go up and i'm gonna sit in this this reserve for a week and a half uh i'm gonna actually look and see what it's like or i'll go over to northern bc and see what those guys are at how many cabinet meetings have been held in fort mcmurray to actually hear the views of those who are under the sale of their principal policy you can go to paris you can go to rio de janeiro you can go to glasgow in november but you can't visit the site where the people the people are working it's become professionalized it's become a hobby it's become a game and the the calling of this election there was no motive for it there was no national crisis there was no specific occasion on which mr trudeau looked around in the house of commons and said this this house can no longer function i must call it and here is the issue so the debates are all part of that plastic effort to make it look real it's a game played by the people within it and people i talk to generally the people you meet on the streets and everywhere else they have no time for this at all they really say get it over with what are we doing here and then it's in the middle of the pandemic at the time that afghanistan is being overrun by militant i think it's so sad so let me ask you you've been watching politics for a very very long time and and and thinking about it for a very very long time and so would you look at justin trudeau i'd like your opinion about trudeau and what he and who he is and what he's done over the last couple of years and and i'd like you to maybe contrast him with other leaders that canada's had that you've been relative intimately familiar with or or at least compared to most people and so like what do you what do you see well i seen the case of mr trudeau i'll keep it as as mild as i can uh the capacity is not there if you contrast him with stephen harper or his father and i did have a couple of lengthy sessions with pierre trudeau and it's not to be mean but but the contrast between the capacity uh the range of knowledge uh depth of personality is really something else in the case of mr harper the contrast there is and i just just a side note i do not understand why harper has become such a symbol of a venomous beer he's a sauron he's a very intelligent quite diligent introspective and concerned about actually doing the task i think harper was one of the most modest in company in terms of public display but when we come now to the current situation the preparation is not there it was a kind of idle life i found the episode in india more more distressing than probably most other people it wasn't the fact that he adopted the costume of a foreign country and he's prime minister of this one is that he was done for so long it was five or six days in which a prime minister of the great first world country visiting another of deep civilization conducts this this this play with this whole family and then we come to this present moment he makes these commitments he's a feminist well he chases the three strongest women in his cabinet one is a white doctor one is an aboriginal lawyer one is is one of the most dynamic black candidates that we have ever seen he hits all the bases that he's supposed to admire every single major theme diversity respect equality inclusion women feminism every single one of these have been tumbled down and i you said the contrast with others i could contrast with some premiers uh i know that joey smallwood in his day became hectic careless and scandal written i know other premiers were as well if i were to contrast it with peter lawhead lawhead had to gravitas that when he spoke to there's something yeah that's a very good point in this particular period of the pandemic the economic distresses that are going to hundreds of thousands of houses in this country and the shadow of afghanistan our leaders should have a podium some once or twice to come out and speak as the prime minister of canada not the liberal not that canada here's where we are people of canada i know what you are enduring not sloganizing we got your back and i'm spending this money so you no here's the serious situation and there are bigger things coming up maybe harder things maybe the next two years won't be building back better maybe we're going to be facing a period of real urgency and demanding more work than we've ever done and we may have to cut back but i want you to know i'm here and i'm not here to divide you and i'd like to you know take the pressure off of alberta if it's at all possible stop picking on one province where's the leader doing that mr o2 but i'm saying all that about mr trudeau mr o'toole is a quieter man and i think he probably has more depth in in terms of character because of what he was but he seems to me to be playing a political game where's this where's the strong i think poor i think that he's been he's been handled into no that's a bad sign a liberal essentially into into basically adopting the liberal policy is he's he's accepting the ethos that you don't offend yes yes and that's that's a bad thing because you you need spine you need the integrity of someone i've actually thought about that meaning the leader i've actually thought about this and you know it's going to be hard news for you folks but this is what we're going to do now but this campaign so far they've jumped from abortion uh to gun rights uh to the anti-vaxxers i'm skipping a couple they've tried out various little buttons to see if they can make the puppets dance which tell me only one thing they do not have an issue they called it for nothing except they're either worried about the next two years and wanted better cover or because the polls told them they could get a majority in other words it was internal it was it was of them it was of the politicians not of the public i'm preaching at you so what what made me skeptical about trudeau to begin with i'd like your opinion on this is that it wasn't obvious to me that he had the preparation for the job by any stretch of the imagination it's a very hard job and it is a job that would be too hard for me i i know that and and so i'm not saying this as someone who thinks he could step in and and do this properly it's a very stressful job but it's very complicated but i think that also means that you have to be very careful when you decide that you're the guy to do it and if if mr trudeau's last name had been anything other than trudeau he wouldn't have ever been the leader of the liberal party or the prime minister of canada and it seems to me it isn't clear to me how you'd have to think in order to think that that was actually okay like what do you what do you have to think to believe that oh well you know i really don't know how to do this i'm not prepared for it i don't have the educational background or the experiential background but everyone knows my name i've got name brand recognition man i've really got that and so it's okay if i'm prime minister it's like actually it's not okay actually that's that's requiring a a a degree of introspection that i wouldn't anticipate but here's a there's a real answer uh and it just it just doesn't relate just to him at all we've now entered this new world where the celebrity the word celebrity has changed since 1970 you know where someone uh pumps up their rear end and becomes an international star uh people who who exist only on the tinsel of celebrity which celebrity is fame without achievement if you want to have real definition fame with nothing behind it and in this new world if you have a name or if you're flashed on a screen or if you can get involved magazine you take the advantages that come with it and if that means a hundred million dollars to do with netflix for dreary megan and whatever his name is or if i can wander into the political office for five years and i i have my subordinates and friends take care of the problems uh i i like the altitude and i like the exhibition and i like the fact that you know the world's going to be looking at me for the first year and a half incidentally it was difficult to determine whether he was going to end up in people magazine or foreign policy but it was obviously people magazine you know i'm using an old reference celebrity culture modern culture is is all over itself giving positions and authority to those who wield them only for the status attached to them and not for the competence that they bring to the task look at journalism well so the well the question is there how how is it that you justify that to yourself in your own mind do you say something like well look the liberal party came to me and then they did come to him and you know maybe better the liberals than anyone else and i do have the name brand recognition and yeah i mean what's the rationalization there well there's the and the other rationalization and i pity them if they believe it by pitying them if they believe it uh on hardcore liberals i'm not a liberal or conservative in any formal sense among hardcore liberals uh conservatives are looked down upon as neanderthal or racism or nazis harper really is a demon now if you can believe that you've either taken leave of your mental faculties or they never visited in the first place but there are some liberals and i think justice one he said there before he was prime minister he was in an interview in quebec that you know if the policies of stephen harper were to be the continue in canada if canada became the canada of the stephen harper policies then he would have to consider separation i don't know where he got that but the idea that stephen harper was a malignant administrator of this country is worse than insult and then because i'm so honorable i would have to say let's take quebec out of canada that's a delusion and even two days ago when he's asked other questions about vaccinations and stuff he hauls poor old stephen harper must be very tired and getting getting hauled out of the closet every six days by justin trudeau um no it's the carelessness of the modern age people take on tasks they're not acquainted with uh liberals are the savior of the world oh yes go back to the very beginning i'm also one i will be leading the salvation of the world because i will tackle global climate change religious messianism is a well-known phenomenon you've got a slight instance of it here transferred to politics it's not the introspection you're looking for the cloud comes down he said as he said it to his wife sophie and you think i was put on earth for this that's a bad attitude to have if you're entering politics it really is so we've done a lot of complaining you and me oh i'm ready for the situation yeah yeah and so and we're you know we're fortunate to be in the position where we can complain and we can complain freely and so far so far um where do we go from here like where did canadians go for here from here what do we do with this election and and it what do you see our way forward properly i know those are they're naive questions in some sense i suppose but but not but they are the questions but not the problem the fact is of course the election is only the illustration of the deeper problem and the deeper problem and not being pretentious is what we have we talked about for a considerable time in the previous interview this is just an instance of an ethic of a style it's an instance of the new western attitude where you self-derogate where you attempt to your own advantage when you take on guilts that are not your own when you assume virtues and you assume that the assumption of the virtues is the performance of the virtues which is not true in other words it's idle in that sense it's vain in another and we've allowed our intellectual capacity to greatly devolve we've we've outlawed honest a strong argument and instead we're trafficking and this is many from the left we traffic in ugly insults and and horrible terms and chase people off platforms this is the 21st century in a western democracy as we said in the lesson so how do you think that in such a context when the schools are running mad with their cult favorite causes rather than doing the job of teaching literature and music and mathematics when the universities have allowed great streams of third grade and fourth rate fallacious thought wander in how do you think politics would be spared from this we are a harvest of things past where we go from here i suppose it is feeble you just keep pointing that we must return to some solid sanity some solid rationality we must respect the virtues that got us where we are we must be grateful to the people who went before us and we must become serious again i think we by our our standing of living and the fact that we've been secure since the second world war in the main sense and we have not had the probations of our pioneer fathers or mothers has made us careless and has allowed to evaporate the very the very central characteristics of personal character that brought us here maybe maybe hurt will remind us that we have to relearn the very things that gave us what now we seem to be abandoning sorry to go on no i think that's a good place to close [Music] you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 420,198

Rating: 4.917336 out of 5

Keywords: trudeau election 2021, trudeau election results, trudeau election cbc, trudeau election commercial, trudeau election call, Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, maps of meaning, biblical series, free speech, freedom of speech, biblical lectures, personality lectures, personality and transformations, trudeau election polls, trudeau election speech 2021, rex murphy, rex murphy politics, peterson trudeau, jordan peterson just trudeau

Id: C3mZn5nimaU

Length: 69min 38sec (4178 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/GorchestopherH]

So much good stuff in this.

The US has reduced carbon emissions 14%.... due to fracking.

Alberta produces cleaner energy than is available to most of North America, but Canada's solution is to make sure we don't build pipelines so we can safety and effectively transport that energy.

Someone needs to supply energy to the US, and we don't want to, so they need to get it from all the way from the Middle East, put it on tankers, and send it across the ocean.

#BecauseWe'reStupid

[u/CallsareFreeMoney]

When’s bernier interview?