https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=DRXC2YF0yaE
I think it’s very important that history regards this episode fairly, because Canadians, Americans, people all over the world, in the free world have been subjected to unprecedented government tactics, right? The censorship, the segregation, the psychological manipulation. And if that narrative somehow prevails, and it suggests that it saved lives, then we will never fully get our democracy back and we will never fully go back to normal. And those are two propositions that I find unacceptable. We have to get our democracy back. We have to go back to normal. Hello, everyone. As you may or may not know, and probably don’t, Canada is in the midst of a leadership race for its federal conservative party. The federal conservatives in Canada are generally the second most likely political party in Canada to govern at the federal and the provincial levels. Recently, as a consequence of the aftermath of the truckers convoy, the conservative party blew up in some sense in Canada. The leader resigned and a new slate of contenders is now vying for leadership position. I spoke with one of them recently, Pierre Pauliev, who’s currently the front runner, and I extended an invitation to the other candidates to speak with me. Mr. Roman Baber took me up on that. He’s currently, as I said, a candidate for leadership of Canada’s federal conservative party. He’s a former member of Ontario’s provincial parliament. He was removed most infamously by Ontario Premier Doug Ford from that provincial government caucus after calling out the collateral harm of lockdowns in January 2021. Since then, Mr. Baber has been a staunch advocate in favour of a balanced COVID response and such emergency responses, and in particular against lockdowns due to their toll on the health and mental health of Canadians. Roman also brought legislation to cut MPP, member of provincial parliament, pay to Canadian emergency response benefit levels while emergency orders are in place, commenced, and is in litigation against the Attorney General of Ontario over Canadians’ right to protest and worship outdoors, and recently put forward a bill to outlaw workplace mandates. He is running for leader of the Conservative Party of Canada because he does not wish to, quote, sit back while Canadians are losing faith in Canada’s democracy and Canadian opportunity. Thank you very much, Mr. Baber, for coming to talk to me today, and I’m looking forward to a provocative discussion. Good to be with you, Jordan. So let’s start with a question that I thought was handled very badly by the Conservatives during the last federal debate. The debate was during the election that Trudeau precipitously called. The debate was framed around five issues, and one of the things I thought the Conservatives did extraordinarily badly was to allow the Progressives, essentially, to dictate the terms of the debate, to dictate the topics. And so one of the things I wanted to ask you, you’re contending for leadership of the Conservative Party and hypothetically for prime ministership of Canada. What do you think the most crucial issues facing Canadians today are? I think, like, in much of the Western world, it’s the erosion of Canada’s democracy that I fear very much and that propelled me to enter into this race. I’m seeing unprecedented erosion, whether it’s by way of censorship. We have two or three pieces of legislation in Canada seeking to abridge freedom of speech. We have regulators coming down on membership. We have obviously social media giants also censoring speech. Then, as many of you know, I have been very saddened by the fact that close to 20% of Canadians are treated as effectively second class citizens. I made the choice that most Canadians have made, but that doesn’t mean that we should impose our choice on others. In fact, we’ve never done that as Western civilization. We’re seeing an unlawful invocation of the Emergencies Act that was predicated in false propositions, voted on after the alleged emergency was over, clearly without meeting the matter of the law, which suggests that you don’t need it if you have other legislation to deal with. So Jordan, I think that if you don’t have democracy, you don’t have anything. And I’m very, very concerned about where we’re headed. So what makes you think that this concern is warranted? I mean, you’re from the former Soviet Union, so you have experience with such things, your family does, certainly. You talked about censorship. We could go into that with Bill C-11 in particular, which is a stunningly overreaching piece of legislation, no matter how you slice it. And will be absolutely impossible to oppose. What makes you think that we’re actually facing something serious in Canada in relationship to our democratic freedoms? And why should people assume that this isn’t just a, you know, what a scandalous talking point that the Conservatives are using to drum up interest in the leadership race? What do you see happening? Well, as they would say in Latin, locutor, it speaks for itself. You see it before your very eyes. Government is passing legislation which would dictate, which would manipulate what Canadians see online. Given the CRTC, which is our broadcast regulator, even more power to determine what we may and may not see. We see government also picking winners and losers in the media. In that we know that we do not have effectively free and independent media in Canada because it’s heavily subsidized. The government bailed out the media a couple of years ago and continues with annual subsidies. How can you have free and independent media when the government signs its paycheck? Yeah, well, let’s drill down into that a little bit. So the Canadian federal government subsidizes the CBC to the tune of between 1.5 billion a year for a shrinking market of virtually no viewers. And then seems to also, in some sense, collude with the CBC to produce news pieces that are in keeping with government legislation. And then to refer to those pieces of legislation for proof that the legislation being covered was actually necessary to begin with. And then there’s this broader pattern of subsidizing media in general. And to me, this is reminiscent of what’s technically termed fascism, because fascism comes from fascist to bind together. And fascism is collusion of elites, right? So government, media, corporation, colluding together to produce a kind of monolith. What would Pierre Poliev on my podcast when I interviewed him famously or infamously said that he would defund the CBC? And so what’s your take on that from a policy perspective? So it’s important for viewers, as you mentioned, to understand I was born in the former Soviet Union and we didn’t leave until I was almost nine. I still have a very good recollection about that communist regime. Specifically, there was a newspaper called Pravda. Pravda means truth in the Russian language. And so Pravda would be plastered all over walls and buildings and subway stations. And it would essentially be government talking points. And what we’ve seen, particularly in the last two or three years, is that government was effectively repeating, sorry, media was effectively repeating government talking points. Particularly as it came to the public health exercise. But I would say beyond that. So we don’t only have this funding of the CBC, which I will end before lunchtime. We also have bailouts and subsidies of a number of other stakeholders in the media. And on top of that, we’re now seeing an unprecedented move for media buys. Government has become one of the biggest advertisers on all news and media platforms. And there’s an old rule in the ad game. He or she who pays for the ad gets their narrative across. And so I would not just defund the CBC. I will also end the bailouts and the subsidies and I will limit the way that government is able to advertise on all platforms. I’m sure your viewers fully agree and understand that free and independent media is one of the most important checks and balances we have in our democracy. Because it is in fact vested with the responsibility to put a check on government. Something we’re simply not seeing in Canada, which I think in large part resulted in the catastrophe that I’ve alleged has transpired over the last two years. Yeah, well, you know, we have the continual suspension of Parliament in Canada, which is a catastrophe that’s now being extended essentially another year in an absolutely unprecedented and unwarranted move. And so the possibility for genuine opposition to the Trudeau government’s policies has been dramatically reduced on the parliamentary front. And now we have this situation where the press, which and even the CBC in years past, was at least under some circumstances. And what would you say an effective critic of the of the of governmental policies, both federal and provincial, and also saw that as their sacred duty, let’s say. That seems to have gone entirely by the wayside. And so that means Canadians are in a position. I saw this with the truckers convoy. Now, when Trudeau called the misogynists and bigots and that they were attempting in some sense to foment a coup, my sense that was that Canadians had a really hard option in front of them, which was to either decide that their prime minister was a complete liar and that the federal government had become untrustworthy as an institution, along with all the legacy media outlets, or that the truckers were reprehensible misogynists and bigots. And many Canadians decided to take the latter stance. But it’s not surprising to me because our institutions have been pretty sound for about 150 years. And it’s a bitter pill for Canadians to swallow, to understand that that in some real sense may no longer be the case. You cannot underestimate the role that the media plays in everyday Canadian discourse. You said yourself at the commencement of this interview that conservatives have difficulty framing the debate. In fact, liberals frame the debate very, very well. And so it seems like we’re fighting every election on their ground instead of talking about issues that may be important to us. And so there is no question that media has a large part in how the daily conversation goes on, which is why it’s so important that we keep it independent and objective by ending all financial relationship between government and the media. But back to the truckers. Jordan, everything the Trudeau government said about the Ottawa convoy turned out to be false. The arson was not connected. There were no web… Yeah, that was a huge lie, man. There was no weapons found anywhere near the site. There was very little foreign funding, about 10 to 12 percent, and all of it was with small donations. And there was no foreign collusion. And it’s on the strength of those misrepresentations that a lot of Canadians form public opinion. And on the strength of those misrepresentations that the government tried to justify the invocation of the Emergencies Act, which is the successor of the War Measures Act that hasn’t been invoked since the 70s. And so this particular piece of legislation was invoked for the first time. This is, of course, an upfront to democracy, but it’s important in how you stated that it was, in fact, the CBC that raised the prospect of foreign collusion. And one or two cabinet ministers pointed to evidence in the media in support of their suggestion that there was foreign collusion. So the government is funding the media. The media is speculating and is often wrong. The government is predicating action on the basis of such media speculation and then justifies its invasive and very undemocratic action. So I think we’re in real trouble thing here. And we’ve got to rethink all of this. Well, Trudeau, it seems to me that Trudeau believes his own press releases in some real sense. And I’m not actually quite as cynical about that as I might be, because I don’t think it’s possible to generate a web of deception around you, a web of instrumental deception around you and simultaneously maintain your distance from that. And so I think when he feeds stories to the CBC and then the CBC feeds them back, he believes it. It’s not merely cynical. It’s that he’s trapped up in his own web of deception. I think we’ve been seeing less in the last couple of years. One of the hallmarks of authoritarian regimes is that they peddle half truths or things that often are not true. But quite often they tend to believe in the system that people around them are made to buy into those half truths because that essentially strengthens the system. And we’ve seen that largely in our public health exercise. We’ve seen, for instance, that and even I’m talking about objective facts, facts that we understood pretty well. For instance, we knew that the modeling was not reliable. The modeling was consistently overly aggressive. They would meet some of the metrics like cases, but we understood very early that the factor by which you have to multiply all the categories we’re interested in, like hospitalizations or deaths, was constantly overstated. And but despite that, even though time and time again the modelers were wrong, the government continued to this pervasive fear, this belief that we have to continue down this very aggressive path of mitigation that, of course, resulted in a catastrophe. Well, and a catastrophe that hasn’t ended yet because the fact that we disrupted supply chains, we’re still going to pay for that. And I was thinking the other day, too, you know, because we locked everything down around the whole world, that also meant that political leaders didn’t get to meet face to face. And so in some real sense, Putin, for example, was taken out of the face to face discussions that might have also otherwise occurred for a period of a couple of years. And God only knows what that did to savage Russia, Western relationships. So we like the consequences of this lockdown have not by any stretch of the imagination come to an end yet. Now, you got you got tossed out of the Doug Ford Conservative Provincial Caucus because of your vociferous objection to the lockdown. So let’s let’s go into that for for a bit. What happened there and why why did it come to blows, so to speak? And and what’s that what’s been the consequence of that for you? And what should Canadians think about that? I started feeling a lot more optimistic about the risk of covid early in May 2020. Public health came in and said, look, first of all, 80 percent, almost 80 percent of everyone that regretfully passed away were in long term care homes and congregate settings. So, OK, that’s that’s, of course, tragic. So let’s focus our resources on long term care into infection protocol and control instead of locking down healthy people and making them sick. The second element we learned very early is that the virus was considerably more transmissible than we thought. And that was actually good news because that meant that there was the infection rate was considerably higher than previously thought. And that means that the metrics that we’re worried about, like hospitalizations, like like deaths, like mortality is significantly lower. And of course, I thought that we’re going to potentially pivot our response because there is no question that locking down healthy people, delaying their surgeries, canceling cancer screenings and, of course, locking down the economy is probably not going to be good for our health and mental health. And as time went on in 2020, I started hearing more and more of some of those unintended consequences of lockdown. And so I had difficulty towards the end of 2020 to continue to not be able to speak out on something that I felt defined our generation. I worked very it is well known that I worked very hard within my government to try and steer them into a different course. But in early January, I realized that we’re probably not going to turn. And all I wanted to do, Jordan, is to start a conversation because there was no conversation. People were afraid to tell their best friend that their kid is depressed because that would render you a gramma killer of some sort. And I was hoping that by issuing this public letter, the conversation would start, would ensue. And in fact, thankfully, it started. What I was also hoping for is that a lot more leaders would follow, a lot more business leaders, political leaders, union leaders, trade leaders, whoever, academic leaders. But unfortunately, that did not happen much because of this culture of fear that has gagged everyone into silence. And and so since then, I’ve been asked to leave caucus. I lost my chairmanship of the Justice Committee, but I’m at peace with my decision. And I’m grateful that I’ve been able to give a voice to many Canadians. Yeah, well, I mean, Ford obviously piloted Ontario well enough to in the minds of the constituents to win an overwhelming majority in the last election. And so he steered a course that seemed to be in accord with the desires of the people. Were you surprised? Now, I have been personally unhappy, at least to some degree, with the degree to which Mr. Ford has cozied up to the federal liberals and also appalled at some of the legislation, for example, that his Minister of Education has proposed. I think that was Bill C-67, which is an absolutely appalling piece of legislation likely to die in ignominy in any case. But that’s not precisely the point. Were you what was your personal experience like trying to make the case that you made and then running into opposition from your former compatriots? It’s interesting to note that and I, of course, will not reveal any names or details and I will not breach confidentiality of my former caucus. But I will say that it’s well known that many have, in fact, shared my view, including at times even the Premier himself. And it’s regretful. And I found it incredibly regretful that we didn’t have the courage, we didn’t have the political courage to say enough. We have to reassess our response because we’re clearly harming people. Right? If this was tax policy or if we were dealing with highway construction, fine. I understand why some people might be more inclined to do politics than others. But when it comes to human life, and that’s what I try to stress in this exercise. Subsequent to my expulsion from the Conservative caucus, I’ve been subjected to a lot of criticism, I would say, pointed lightly by our opposition, by media and others. But and somehow there is this dispersion where people try to suggest that you don’t care about life or you want to compromise life. But I think it’s precisely the opposite. It was an attempt to save lives. And in fact, I think that this entire exercise of the last couple of years dehumanized so many people around the world. In fact, as we try to convey this collective sense goal of safetyism, what we’ve in fact done is the opposite, is we’ve compromised human life, we’ve compromised human ingenuity, we’ve compromised, we’ve regressed our children considerably. And so the goal was to take a holistic view. And so that’s what I’m upset by my friends. Given recent SCOTUS wins, it feels like the pendulum may be swinging back to a time when the nuclear family was situated at the center of American life, where real conversation, learning and growth began at home. President Ronald Reagan said in his farewell address that all great change in America begins around the dinner table. Well, all great meals in America begin with good ranchers. Good ranchers cares deeply about providing families with steakhouse quality beef, chicken and seafood meat at a reasonable price. Their mission is to bring people to the table, making those shared moments with your loved ones easy, accessible and delicious. Good Ranchers ships 100% American meat, born, raised and harvested in the U.S. right to your door. Plus, when you subscribe, your price is locked in for the life of your subscription. Great food creates great conversation, and great conversation makes great change. So start bringing people back to the table with high quality American meat. Go to GoodRanchers.com slash Peterson to get 10 at the gas pump whenever she fills up is probably not going to affect climate change. Right. It’s probably not going to factor into global temperatures. We should kind of produce is less than a percent and a half of all global emissions. And it’s not clear that even if we were to cut all of them, that it would make a material difference. And so instead, we’re just punishing Canadians with our environmental policy. That is something that the Conservative Party had difficulty articulating over the last couple of election. And also Canada could be supplying cheap and reliable energy to the US. We could be doing the same for Europe. We could be doing the same for China. And we could be so we could have our cake on the energy front and eat it, too. We could provide clean and and carefully regulated fossil fuel energy supplies on a global scale. We could make ourselves much more prosperous than we already are by using our natural resources properly. And we could make advances on the environmental front. We know, for example, with the Americans that they cut their carbon output for those who are concerned about such things. And I don’t happen to be one of them particularly, but they cut their carbon output substantially by turning to fracking and natural gas utilization. And no environmentalist preachers saw that coming. I think Canada’s natural resources are a blessing and we should not let and I certainly will not let oil and gas be cancelled. And it’s important not just for our strategic national interests in our economic bottom line, because that’s the only way we’re going to get out of our economic hole. But it’s also good for the planet because Canadians can produce and derive energy cleaner and safer than any other nation on earth. And so I’m very interested not in just oil and gas, but mining. We have an insatiable appetite around the world for precious metals and minerals. I’d like to look into natural gas as well. I think if you’re concerned about the environment, then you should certainly be more interested in transporting oil and gas by pipeline instead of transporting oil by train, which is very, very risky. I think, you know, as we come to think, as we look at this conversation, I think that we can solve almost everything that ails Canada right now with democracy and natural resources. If we just… Yeah, well, you know, it’s definitely the case that the Conservatives on the environmental front could be taking the moral high ground back from the idiot environmentalists, because these are problems that we can solve. And the pathway to solving them is actually laid forward quite clearly, not least by people like Bjorn Lombard, who produced an extremely detailed roadmap, I would say, of how to move forward in the face of the climate changes that we may perhaps be contributing to. We’re obviously going to be able to adapt to them. And they’re nowhere near as cataclysmic as the doomsayers have prognosticated constantly from Elgore onward. So we can do this and we can do it while ensuring that everyone had abundant resources, that the poor didn’t have to freeze in the dark, which seems to be the leftist environmental approach to the problem. It’s like, who cares about today’s poor when we have poor in 100 years to worry about, you know, pretty, pretty sad bit of moralizing. And obviously, one, this war in Russia with Ukraine and with the West in general has certainly brought home one of the consequences of what foolish environmentally predicated energy policy. That’s another thing that Canada could play a role in ameliorating. We don’t just can do this. We must do this. Yes. You know, half of Canadians, there are a lot of estimates even before the most recent inflationary crisis is that almost half of Canadians were $200 away from not being able to meet their monthly obligations. And so now with the price of gas effectively doubling and the price of everything and most notably food, significantly increasing, many Canadian families are vulnerable. And we cannot continue to have this conversation over and over. We need to get serious and at least telegraph to the market that we’re willing to start and we’re determined to develop Canada’s natural resources that will immediately give people some relief. And which is why I’m really worried also, Jordan, if I may very quickly, I’m nervous about what’s happening by way of our monetary policy. So much of this inflation is driven by food and energy that I’m not sure that aggressive tightening of our monetary policy is going to make the traditional difference that tightening would. And instead, what we’re doing is we’re significantly increasing the cost of borrowing, which means we’re increasing the cost of living on many Canadians. And I’m. Yeah, that’s exactly right. Well, there are actually food shortages and they’re going to get a lot worse, especially with the fertilizer crisis. And so this isn’t this inflation isn’t merely a consequence of runaway monetary policy. Precisely. Yeah, it is. It is quite the situation. You know, you could have hardly hoped for a worse outcome to entice Canadians into over investing on margin in real estate and then cranking up the interest rates to cut them off at the knees, which is exactly what’s happening at the moment. It’s important to appreciate that our housing industry accounts for about a third of our economy. And for many people, it’s their life investment, right? Their principal residence can be their way to save for retirement. And the fact that we continue to to try and undermine the market, even though we have to focus on affordability for sure, but we also want to preserve value for people that work hard for it. But beyond that, yes, the main cause, in my view, for what’s transpiring is not just the printing. We printed half a trillion dollars with nothing in Canada with nothing to show for. But but beyond that, it’s the lockdowns, in my view, that are responsible for this runaway inflation. We essentially we stopped the supply chain and it strikes a number of times. We reopen the economy. So there’s obviously a spike in demand and supply is simply not catching up to demand. The market is out of equilibrium. You can’t get anything. You know, Penguin Random House informed me that they couldn’t put out a double edition of my book in any reasonable amount of time. My two books, because they can’t get cardboard or paper. That’s Penguin Random House. A sheet of plywood in British Columbia is now one hundred dollars. You can’t buy a vehicle for love nor money. Most most large scale appliances and that sort of thing, especially those that depend on chips, are in unbelievably scarce supply. And one in five container ships right now across the world is locked in a port somewhere unable to move because of backups. Like we have no idea how much damage we did to the supply chain. And we are by no means done with that catastrophe. No, I like to joke. My Jeep started misfiring and I gave it to the dealership and they told me it’s going to take three weeks because there are no car parts. So there’s no car parts, not because not because we printed so much money, but but because we simply stopped the supply chain in its tracks. But there’s another reason for all of this. And I think that that’s the tragedy of the labor market. That is the remarkable unprecedented catastrophe in our legal in our labor market. Canadians have already suffered from low productivity before the pandemic. But what I’m seeing right now and speaking to many Canadians and small businesses and medium businesses, businesses of all sizes, is that there’s a remarkable shortage of labor. And even though it appears as if we’re back to almost full employment, we’re just north of five percent unemployment, which seems good. But productivity has not come back. People are working less. People are not. Those some continue to work remotely. So productivity is done is down. And, you know, primarily what I’m noticing, and that’s something that I talk about a lot, is that the labor force has suffered a post trauma from covid. A lot of a lot of, I think, Canadians and others around the world feel that something was materially lost in the last couple of years. They’re losing faith in institutions. They’re estranged from their family. They’re seeing erosion of their democracy. Nothing’s fun anymore. And so that, of course, translates itself into productivity. And until we restore productivity, we will not catch up on supply and we will not be able to catch up with inflation. Demoralization. Yeah. Well, Canada, Canadians, what, we’re 35 percent now behind the Americans in terms of comparative productivity. And the OECD has prognosticated that will be the worst performing industrial economy in the world for the next 40 years. It’s a disaster. That’s what Canadians are facing. So that means in all likelihood, we’ll be half as wealthy as the Americans in 10 years. That’s what it looks like now. When we could be more wealth, we could be wealthier and more prosperous than any nation on earth with reasonable policy. I’m not sure how we get out of this in the short term, but I know I know the following for for fat is that as soon as Canadians start feeling that this public health episode is behind us, when we feel that we no longer need government intervention, those that perceive risk should certainly are welcome to take mitigation steps. But for for many Canadians to continue to worry, are they going to lose their job if they don’t take a booster? Are they going to have to work? Are they going to have to work a minimum wage job again if they have to wear a mask for eight hours? Are they going to be told that they might not be able to go to school again next year? All of the while government still remains in our faces, so to speak, the labor force has a difficulty recovering. We need to give people a relief by extricating government out of our lives as quickly as possible. Yeah, well, God only knows what’s going to happen when we face the next serious flu, because the mortality rate for covid wasn’t that high. And as you pointed out, most of the people who died had were very elderly, often already passed their stated life expectancy in the vast majority of cases and also suffered from a number of comorbidities. And so and there’s going to be a serious flu epidemic in the near future because we haven’t had a serious flu for a number of years. And so it’s an open question now. What mortality rate will be deemed acceptable by the public health mavens and authoritarians who’ve now come to run the government and to provide us with the excuse to lock down yet again? Like what if the next flu is half as deadly as we thought covid was going to be? Are we going to lock everyone down again? And if not, why not? Where’s the line now that we’ve established the precedent following in the aftermath of the bloody CCP authoritarians? What what what? It’s no wonder that people feel that something has been lost because something was lost. So this is why it’s so important that history reflects on what happened fairly right. I never sought to minimize the risk of covid. It can be a very serious infection for certain folks, and it can regretfully be deadly for some. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t need to be forefront about objective metrics. It doesn’t mean that we don’t need to factor the collateral harm and potentially rethink our response. But but beyond that, I think it’s very important that history regards this this episode fairly because Canadians, Americans, people all over the world in the free world have been subjected to unprecedented government tactics, right? The censorship, the segregation, the psychological manipulation. And if that narrative somehow prevails and it suggests that it saved lives, then then we will never fully get our democracy back and we will never fully go back to normal. And those are two propositions that I find unacceptable. We have to get our democracy back. We have to go back to normal. And that will also help us deal with potentially the next public health crisis, because we should have the courage to address it professionally and objectively. So. So let’s turn a bit now to the actual Conservative Party race. And I just looked at some stats this morning about popularity polling within the Conservative Party itself. And there are there were six candidates, although my understanding is that Patrick Brown has now withdrawn from the leadership race. And so there are five remaining, if I have that right. And Pierre Pauli has clearly has the lead and Jean Charest is clearly in second place. I asked Charest people, by the way, if they if he wanted to speak with me on this podcast, as I said, I’ve extended an opportunity to all of the leaders and my the response I received as far as I can tell, although it wasn’t exactly that clear, was that the Charest people decided I was too toxic to associate with the aftermath of the tweet I put out about a swimsuit illustrated model. I guess they thought that was a scandal, which was quite surprising to me because it was a tempest in a teapot. But in any case, Poliev seems to have about 45 percent of the of the popular sport among those who are going to vote in the Conservative leadership race and Charest about 14. And then you and Leslyn Lewis and Scott Aitchison are bringing up the rear. What do you expect and hope to what do you hope to accomplish by your leadership race? And what do you see as the future for the Conservative Party as the vote occurs and there’s a new leader? What and how do you hope to play a role in that? So, look, of course, we still see a path to winning, although I’m not under any illusion that that we are not in first or second place. I will not comment on my friends and how they perceive or choose to conduct the race. I think it’s important for the electorate itself to evaluate our respective positions and approach to the race, because this is really an audition for the general election. But what what I think is important that I’ve been blessed to contribute to the conversation. I’m glad that many of the conservative candidates are coming around on this question of democracy. Initially, a lot of media speculated that Roman’s just going to talk about covid and lockdown that’s behind us. Well, first of all, 20 percent, almost 20 percent of Canadians are still treated differentially. So it’s certainly not behind us. But beyond that, now we’re seeing all the other camps coming around to our democracy message. And so that that is certainly something that I was very much hopeful for and grateful for that we get to push. And second of all, I think that insisting that our party is not afraid to stand for what it believes and that we speak with clarity, something that I’ve tried to do throughout my career in the last couple of years is something that I will demand from and expect from the leadership of this party, the future leadership of this party as the voters expected from us. And that’s the only way we’re going to prevail with with Canadians is when they believe what we say and when we speak clearly and we’re not afraid to stand up for all Canadians, unlike in the last couple of years. Is there I think we should switch over to the to the other portion of this conversation. For those of you who are listening, I’m going to talk to Mr. Baber some more behind the on the Daily Wire Plus website. We’re going to talk a little bit more personally, I would say. Is there anything else, Roman, that you would like to bring to the attention of Canadians? You sort of summed up there by pointing out that, you know, you got pilloried pretty hard for speaking your mind and the leadership convention and race offers you or the leadership race offers you an opportunity to speak your mind again, show that that is possible. And to bring these attention, these issues to the attention of Canadians, which seems to me to be a very valid ambition. Is there anything else that you’d like to say to people before we we move to the second part of this conversation? I don’t see myself as a victim of the cancel culture mob. On the contrary, I saw what transpired as a remarkable blessing. I came to Canada when I was 15. We didn’t have a scent to our name, and I’ve had every blessing this country had to offer. And I would encourage Canadians not to give up on Canada. I’ve always felt that this is the best country in the world because all you need to do to succeed in Canada is work hard and be nice to people. And if you just do those two things, then everything will be OK. And we get to do that and still keep our religious and cultural values and we get to be ourselves. And I have a sense of optimism, as I said to you in the beginning of this interview, that that even the media is turning on Justin Trudeau and so many things that we’re concerned about that illness right now. We can solve them. As I said, we just need democracy and natural resources that would alleviate a lot of the concern we have right now. As soon as government extricates itself out of our lives, we’re going to breathe going to breathe the sigh of relief. We know what to do to solve this. And I’m incredibly grateful to so many Canadians coast to coast with whom my message of democracy has resonated. And I’m also I’m also thankful to all of my friends in this race. We have record membership of six hundred and seventy five thousand members. It’s it’s something to to the credit of all of them. And it’s something to be proud of, because that means we’re bringing a large motivated base into our next election. We have to emerge out of this united and firm. We cannot give up on our country, nor do we need to. We are a wonderful country and I’m optimistic about the future. Great. Well, that’s a lovely place to end. And so thank you very much. I’ve been speaking today with Mr. Roman Baber, who is running for the leadership of the Federal Conservative Party in Canada, hoping to lead that party and then to challenge the reprehensible, shall we say, Justin Trudeau for the position of prime minister of Canada in the next election, which can’t come too soon in my humble estimation. Thank you very much for speaking with me today. Thank you so much, Jordan.