Voice of the Canadian West ｜ Preston Manning ｜ EP 211 (uRVX0K5XCQ0)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=uRVX0K5XCQ0

So what do you think are the fundamental issues that face Canadians at the moment? What do you say the country is in trouble in some ways? Well, I think one is this national unity problem. I don’t think particularly central Canada understands the depth of this Western alienation. Again. Yeah. And if you ever had a dual separatist movement, Quebec moving in that direction and the West moving at the same time, you tear the country apart. I don’t think there’s an appreciation by the Laurentian elites that that old model of Canada is not sufficient for the 21st century. So that and Canadians can never take national unity for granted. Our country is too big and too diverse to just hope it’s going to hang together. So that’s one issue. The second is the fiscal issue. These astronomical deficits and debts and no even recognition that this could be a problem. Hello, everyone. I’m pleased to be talking today with Mr. Preston Manning, PCCCAOE. He’s the founder of the Manning Foundation for Democratic Education and the Manning Center for Building Democracy, which seek to strengthen the knowledge, skills, principles and ethical foundations of participants in Canada’s political processes. Born in 1942, Preston Manning is the second son of longtime Alberta premier Ernest C. Manning, who was also a prominent Christian layman and broadcaster. Growing up in a household which was both political and evangelical, he became intimately familiar with the political and religious experience of Western Canada. He has written and spoken extensively on navigating the faith political interface. He served as member of parliament from 93 to 2001 and founded two political parties, the Reform Party of Canada and the Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance, both of which became the official opposition in the Canadian parliament and laid the foundation for the Conservative Party of Canada. He served as leader of the opposition from 97 to 2000 and was also his party’s science and technology critic. In 2007, he was made a companion of the Order of Canada and in 2013 was appointed to the Privy Council. Mr. Manning graduated from the University of Alberta with a BA in economics and provided consulting services to the energy industry for 20 years before entering the political arena. He has received honorary degrees from eight Canadian universities and is the author of three books, the new Canada, Think Big and Faith, Leadership and Public Life. He’s currently working on a new book tentatively entitled Do Something, 365 Ways to Strengthen Democracy and Conservatism in Canada. Mr. Manning and his wife, Sandra, divide their time between Calgary, Alberta and Vancouver, BC. They have five grown children and 12 grandchildren. Mr. Manning, it’s really good to see you again. It’s been a long time. It is. Yeah. Good to see you, Jordan. Great to be with you. Thank you. Thank you. We met originally. I asked you to come and speak to a group that I had hosted at the University of Toronto for a while, a group of intellectuals. I was really interested in your experiences founding a political party because that’s a very, very difficult thing to do and to bring it to fruition and to make it successful. It became the second largest political party in Canada. And so you were kind enough to share that entire experience with us. I remember at that point, there was enough divisiveness in Canada with regards to political issues that one of the attendees at that seminar was, there was about 30 of them, wouldn’t attend. And so that was not so good, but it was a very interesting. Understandable. Yes. Yes. Well, like the party I was involved in actually goes back to recognizing there’s two parts of Canada that have third party traditions that don’t regularly go back and forth between the traditional Conservative Party and the Liberal Party. One is Quebec, which has a whole third party tradition, the Bloc Québécois, the Parti Québécois, the Rallye Montecredite, goes back a long way. And then Western Canada has a tradition of producing new political parties, the old Progressive Party, the Farmers’ Parties, the Depression Parties of the Canadian Commonwealth Federation and the Social Credit Party. And then reform, which we started, was part of another attempt to advance Western Canadian interest by the creation of a new political party. Probably the lesson out of reform, I get asked that a long time, what’s the biggest lesson? I don’t think it’s the particular accomplishments of reform in an ideological or policy sense, but it’s just the fact that, and I’ve been a great critic of Canadian democracy. I think Canadian democracy could be improved, but notwithstanding all its flaws, a small group of five people who met in a boardroom in Calgary in 1987 and decided we don’t like either of the current political options and we’re going to do something different. We’re able to take the tools that our democracy gives to everybody, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom to try to persuade you to vote this way rather than that way. And we’re able to create a new political party. We kept broadening it out, coalition building, etc., etc., created that Canadian Alliance. And then Stephen Harper and Peter McKay was the leader of the old progressive conservative party in Canada, took it one more step and actually got to a minority government and then a majority government. The fact that you could still do that under our democratic system and in the 21st century, I think should be encouraging to people. If you don’t like what’s happening, you can change it. And a small group of people can change it using the tools that democracy gives to everybody. So there’s a couple of questions there. I mean, it seems to me that maybe Western Canada and Quebec have generated additional political parties, some of them more to the left than traditional parties and some of them more to the right, is because perhaps the West and Quebec have had the most uneasy relationship with Confederacy and so are prone now and then to generate new political forms. So do you think that’s a reasonable analysis or is there something else going on? Well, I think it is. And Canada is a huge country, the second largest country by land mass in the world. And it has distinctive regional differences and diversity, not just geographic, but demographically in every other way. And so it’s not surprising that that should be the case. One of the things I point out in my most recent book is actually out now, this do something for 365 ways to strengthen Canada. I point out to my Quebec friends, and this can often be misunderstood, that in the long run, Quebec is going to have to find an ally somewhere else in Canada than just relying on getting its influence with the federal government. And I have a graph that shows the percentage of French speakers versus English speakers going down, the percentage of Quebec population relation to total Canadian population going down, Quebec proportion of the GDP in relation to Canadian GDP going down. And I say, what that suggests, and I say this to my Quebec friends, you’re going to have to find an ally in somewhere else in the country, not just in Ottawa, to advance your interest and a place you couldn’t find them. And this always surprised them because they think the West is anti Quebec. I say you could find them in the West because what we want and you want is a more decentralized federation. You want a more decentralized federation for social, cultural, linguistic reasons. The West wants it for economic reasons, but the common ground is a more decentralized federation. Now, whether that unholy alliance between Quebec and the West, whatever, occur, I don’t know. When we got to Ottawa, like we got to Ottawa in 1993, in the 93 election, reform got 52 members, all from Western Canada except one from Ontario. And Quebec, the Bloc Québécois got 54 members, just two members different. Another aside there, we lost three seats in Edmonton by 320 votes. If we had got those three seats, a federalist party would have been the official opposition in the 1993 parliament instead of a separatist parliament. And if the country had ever blown apart because the separatists won the referendum in Quebec, I was going to go back to Edmonton and say there’s 325 people here because they didn’t vote. Don’t think your vote doesn’t make a difference. Well, you made two points there. One is that important decisions can be swayed by a very tiny number of people from time to time. And also, and this is one of the things I thought was particularly fascinating about what you did is that the democratic processes are sufficiently permeable so that you can modify them substantially with considerable work, but with a small number of people. Oh, yes. Yes. And just to finish the Quebec West connection, when we got there, we put on a breakfast for the Bloc. We got 100 new members, over 100 new members in the parliament, a huge turnover, none of whom knew each other. So I got a hold of Lucien Bouchard, the leader of the Bloc Québécois, and said we ought to get together, you know, and have a breakfast. We’ll put on a breakfast. We’ll bring the pancakes from the West. You bring the maple syrup from Quebec and we’ll have a get go. And we did. I got up and gave a speech and said, we’re the bunch from Western Canada. They’re discontented with how the Federation is working right now. We want to fix it. We want to change it. We want to reform it. And Lucien got up and said, we’re a bunch from Quebec. We’re not happy with Confederation and we want to get out. And that’s where we ended up. Anyway, that’s sort of a decide on the… But the other dimension of Western Canadian politics, and this is very relevant to some of the subjects you’ve discussed, is there is no region of North America that has had more experience with populist movements, populist parties, and populist governments than Western Canada. And there’s a lot of lessons to be learned from that. The old progressive party, which was like the progressives in the United States in some respect, was basically a Western-based bottom-up, not top-down party. The farmers’ parties that governed in Alberta, governed in Manitoba, briefly governed in Ontario, were bottom-up populist parties. Both the Depression parties, the CCF, the Socialist party, was a bottom-up party. Social Credit in Alberta was a bottom-up party. And Reform, in many respects too, was one of those populist parties. So the West had a lot of experience, not just with populist movements, and not just populist parties, populist governments that actually got into power. And I think there’s lessons to be learned from that with the populist movements of today and how you respond to them and how you lead them and how you handle them. Adam Chapnick So how would you define a populist movement? And do you think the fact that that was able to find expression in the West continually was an advantage or a disadvantage? And I suppose… Rupert Spira Well, there’s two questions there. Well, first of all, I define it as a bottom-up rather than a top-down political movement, with a lot of grassroots support and agitation, rather than something coming down from the top. The other way I define it is populist parties and governments are almost always a product of the previous administrations, the administrations that preceded it. I see Trump is the legacy of Obama. Doug Ford is the legacy of Cass and Wynn in Ontario, because you have an administration, a party before that gets support from a lot of people, usually from the elites, but a lot of other people as well. But it progressively loses contact and support with 50% of the population. And if it does that long enough, it will generate populist movements. So populist movements are very much a product of what was there before, and whether it accepted or alienated large chunks of the population. Adam Chapnick So is that something that you see as a positive force altogether? Because populism often gets a bad name. Rupert Spira Yeah, well, I’d come at that. Again, Western Canada’s experience is, I mean, populist movements have their wild side and they can have their extreme side and they can be dangerous. But I would argue they also have a positive potential. And just again, take the Western Canadian experience. The first woman elected to the federal parliament was Agnes Campbell MacPhail. How did she get there? She did not get there through the Liberal Party. She did not get there through the Conservative Party. In fact, they bitterly fought her election in every election she contested. She got there through the old Progressive Party, the bottom-up party. The famous five, the so-called famous Alberta Five that got women recognized as persons under Canadian law. Four out of the five of those were members of populist movements and populist governments. So this is an accomplishment, the recognition of women as persons, the achievement of women getting elected to the legislation of the parliament was a populist achievement, not an establishment achievement. And then the Depression Party, the CCF, the Socialist Party, whom I don’t agree with, but one of their accomplishments was to get Canadian Medicare. Whether you agree with that or not, most people think that was a progressive development. You can argue about how it’s done and what needs to be done in the future. But that came through a bottom-up provincial populist party. And in Alberta, the social credit regime, one of the big worries if you’re the government and the party in power in a region that gets an oil boom is the danger of corruption. It happened in Texas, it happened in Oklahoma, it happened in Louisiana, it happened in California, it happened in Alaska. The Federal Administration of Warren G. Harding was brought down by corruption through the oil patch. Somebody tried to bribe a federal cabinet minister in order to get drilling rights in a federal party. It almost discredited the Warren administration. And one of the great fears in Alberta was, okay, we had this oil boom in 1947, and my father was the premier then, was how do you keep that from corrupting the people in power? And it was a populist party that managed to not get corrupted. Steve McLaughlin No, I remember you speaking about beginning your political party. You told me, correct me if I’m wrong, but you told me that you went from town to town from city to city across Western Canada. And you had a speech or a variety of speeches that you gave, but that you were most involved in some sense with the question and answer sessions. And that enabled you to sample what people were thinking about what their concerns were, and to weave that into policy. So that became part of a discussion between an emergent political party and the constituents. Oh, yeah. And I think that’s a distinguishing feature of a populist party. It’s a receiver oriented form of communication. When you start not by what do I want to say to these people? And what do I want them to start with? Who are these people? What are they concerned about? Why are they here? Why is that lady in the third row has probably got kids at home and had to make arrangements to come? What on earth is she doing at this political meeting? How would she say what I want to say to them if she was trying to explain it to her friends next door? And I used to get a lot of I would hang around after the meeting and not just for the purpose of shaking hands and how are you and please vote for me. Listen hard to what people were saying to you. And eventually they’ll try to say back to you what they thought you were saying to them. Right. Right. Say my father became premier in 1943 when I was one year old and he was premier for 25 years before he resigned undefeated 25 years later. So I spent my entire life in a political home. And in the 1960s, John Dieffenbaker, who was campaigning to be prime minister, became prime minister, came. There was a couple of elections in the 60s and he came through Edmonton and Calgary where we lived. And my father said, you should go and listen to John. And he said, watch particularly what he does in the first five or six minutes of his talk. So I went to the Edmonton Jubilee Auditorium. We used to come to Jubilee Auditorium. By the time I got there, it was packed full of people. You couldn’t find a place to see, but they were seating the media on the stage behind them. So I pretended I was a media person. I ended up sitting about 20 feet behind them. And I watched the first five or six minutes. He had a big loose leaf book on the podium and he kind of kept flipping it and saying a little bit about that, a little bit about this, looking this way, looking that way, looking at the balcony like that. And it didn’t seem to make any rhyme or reason as to what he was saying, why and in that direction. Then all of a sudden he stopped that and he honed in on three things, Bing, Bang, Boom. And that was the theme of his talk. And what my father said afterwards, what he’s doing, that he, Rediffenbaker was a defense lawyer, very experienced in reading juries. What he’s doing, he’s like a bat. He’s sending out signals, watching what bounces back and then he gets a reading of where the audience is at. Why did that guy go like this? Why did that? So then what would he start? Was he speaking without notes from then on in? Well, yeah, he was very polished by that time. He had some notes there, but I don’t think he really needed them. But I think this, again, this business of trying to read your audience. When I was in the consulting business, we actually developed a questionnaire for receiver oriented communication. What do you have to questions? Do you ask who are these people? What do they believe? How would they say what’s their vocabulary? What’s their conceptual framework? And then given that, okay, given that, now how do I frame my message? What do I say in order to get to them? I know when I was lecturing constantly large crowds, you know, I was always watching individuals within the crowd. I never spoke to the crowd as a whole. I would pick people and talk to them for 15 seconds or so and then pick someone else. And by looking at individuals, I could tell if people were following what I was saying and I could turn the lecture into a conversation. I mean, they weren’t speaking, but I got all the nonverbal cues. And if you use notes or a prepared talk, you obliterate that relationship with the audience. Oh, yeah. And if you can meet with people after and say, I used to do that and listen to them, it would affect my next presentation. One of the classics on that was in the, when Canada got into this during the Mulroney government years into constitutional reform was what was required to unite the country. And there was this constitutional, Charlottetown constitutional court that was negotiated between the federal government, the provincial governments. They all agreed on it. This would solve our unity problems, particularly the difficulties with Quebec. And I had a long, legalistic, dry speech on why all the previous attempts to unite the country through constitutional change had usually failed for a bunch of reasons. Yes, often disastrously. Yes, but it was dry and dull and legalistic. You put your, I even put my wife to sleep, let alone audience. But after one of these meetings where I did that, I was talking to this fella and he said, you know, he’s trying to say to me something along that line. He says, we’re like kids in the back of the car. He says, and we’re trying to get to this place called national unity. And all we’re saying is, are we there yet? Are we there yet? We’re kids in the back of the car. We want to get there, but are we there yet? Are we on the right road? Well, so I refrained my whole speech. I said, Pierre Trudeau said national unity was over near new constitutional drive and we let him drive the car and he’s given people the finger out the window and René Lavec’s in the back saying he’s going to be sick if we don’t let him out. And then we let Joe Clark drive the car, but Joe forgot to put gas in it. We didn’t go very far. And then now Brian Mulgoney says it’s over near some lake called Meach Lake. And now he says it’s over near Charlottetown. And we’re just saying, are we there? I could carry the whole 45 minute history of Canada’s attempt to get national unity through constitutional change by using a simple analogy suggested to me by a guy after the meeting, trying to say the way he would say to his friends what I was trying to say to him. And I’ve had that experience, what was the 2002 federal election? My riding was Calgary Southwest in Calgary. And I used to ride the sea train and I’d start a conversation in the sea train because these are my constituents and then I’d get off and they’d be arguing about something. And so on the day the election was called, this was called by the Kretschian government, there was a sponsorship scandal that was floating around. I was sitting beside a fellow, looked like he was a carpenter because he was covered with sawdust and he had a toolkit. And I said to him, have you heard they called a federal election today? He said, yeah, we heard that. And I said, some of the commentators say that that scandal, that sponsorship scandal, corruption thing in Quebec is going to be a big issue. Do you know anything about that? Do you care about that? And he didn’t answer anything. By now, the ears are perking up in the car. And I thought maybe he’s tuning me out. He says, well, he says, it’s like there’s something rotten in the fridge, he said. And we got to decide whether it’s just the cheese or the yogurt or whether we got to clean out the whole damn thing. Well, by golly, that night I had to give a partisan speech. And guess what my analogy was? Simple, easy to understand, it smells like there’s something rotten in the fridge and we got to decide what to do about it. So I was talking to Congressman Dan Crenshaw yesterday about populism in the United States. And no, he said that his observation was that the dangerous form of populism emerges when leaders tell the audience what they think they want to hear, or there’s a form of manipulation going on. But the what struck me about what you told me years ago about what you did when you created the reform party was that there was a tremendous amount, not so much of telling the audience what they wanted to hear for your purposes, but listening to them so that you could extract out policy that actually addressed people’s concerns. Yes, yes. And we used to use the relief well analogy. Okay, I come from Alberta, where the oil patch analogies are quite common. And in the oil patch, there’s such a thing as a wildcat well that’s drilled into a formation where you don’t know what’s down below. And then there’s such a thing as a rogue well that hits a pocket of oil or gas under enormous pressure. It can be very dangerous. It blows the drilling platform off the wellhead, it can catch fire. In 1948, a year after the Duke discovery when they still didn’t know the extent of the field, there was the Atlantic number three blew out south of Edmonton, it released more oil 10 times the amount of oil than the Exxon Valdez in about four days. And these are huge, can be catastrophic. But one of the ways of dealing with a rogue well is you drill in a relief well from the side. And the angle got to be right. If it’s too shallow, it won’t take off enough pressure. If it’s too deep, it can turn into a rogue well. But if it’s just right, it can take off enough pressure that they can install valves, bring that very valuable energy under control and for useful purposes. Particularly useful metaphor for talking to people in Western Canada. Well, you were also dealing with Western separatism at that time and trying to cut it off to cut it headed off at the pass. Another Western metaphor. Yeah. Well, and that this is what the relief well does. Now, the reform was a relief well, and you had to tap in to the discontent that was generating this. So you had to identify with it, you had to connect to it. But then instead of saying, let’s set fire to something or let’s blow the lid off the government in Ottawa, we said, let’s make some changes that will let’s use this energy for some constructive purpose. And we developed that slogan, the West wants in not out, but it wants in on these kind of conditions. And I think that’s the way you deal with populism is you have to identify with what’s at the roots and you have to get close to it. So you sound a little bit like them when you’re doing that. And that’s what the outside commentators and say, well, you’re just another version of them. No, you’re identifying with it so that you can channel it into something constructive. For our American friends, I’m a great admirer of Thomas Jefferson and his declaration, contributions, Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution. But in around 1820, and he must have been he’s an old man by then. He was asked by some colleague, if you were redoing the Canadian, the American Constitution, would where would you still best the ultimate powers of society? And he said this, I would best the ultimate powers of society in the people themselves and then anticipating the objection to that. But the people themselves are they’re not educated enough. They’ll go chasing after some wild man. He was saying this when Andrew Jackson was already on the on the political scene, a wild guy from the south, not a Virginian. He would have been the Trump of his day. And here’s Jefferson, the patriarchal guy from Virginia, author of the Constitution. He’s saying this with that in mind. He says, and if you think them, the people not fit to exercise self-government with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take self-government from them, but to inform their discretion. That that is a very profound statement. And I’d say that to our American friends that are worried about where populism can lead, particularly depending on who the leaders are. Well, you’re also making a case for a relationship between dangerous population populism and repressed resentment in some sense. So the idea that you’re putting forward is that while any group of policies in some sense is going to generate a counter position, and that counter position can become increasingly alienated and resentful until their fundamental goal is something like drain the swamp or tear the whole thing down or etc. etc. And so communicating with those people before it comes to that and trying to channel that into something that’s hypothetically productive within the system is obviously one of the ways the system maintains itself. Canada has maintained its democracy for a very long time by world standards. I mean, everyone thinks in some sense, we’re a new country, but that’s only true in some ways. Well, and this there’s a way a new wave of Western alienation, like what we face in the late 1980s and 1993. The and you can identify what is it that these Westerners are concerned about. And then you can try to come up with what’s an answer to that. One of the things is just inequality. The West has always been strong on equality. When Western provinces were created, they were not created equal with Ontario and Atlantic provinces in Quebec. They were denied control of their natural resources, which was retained by the federal government, which became a huge cause of resentment. And then finally, they got control of their natural resources in 1930, mainly because of a progressive group in the federal parliament, not federal liberals or conservatives who allied with the government of Alberta at that time and got a constitutional amendment. But the equality equality equality. And right now, the West complains on the equalization formula. Alberta’s contributed whatever it is, 500, 600 billion dollars into the federal treasury, onto the province, other provinces. Alberta gets into financial trouble and there’s nothing coming back. And people say, that’s not fair. That’s not equal. The whole carbon price carbon taxing issue. Albertans say, OK, the rationale behind that is you’re saying that it’s a development of a particular type of energy, in this case, hydrocarbons has negative environmental effects. What we should do is identify those negative environmental effects, figure out what has to be done to avoid or mitigate them. And we ought to include the cost of that avoidance or mitigation in the price of the product, either through a tax or through a pricing regime or whatever. Isn’t that the rationale? And you can say that to public audiences in central Canada, Quebec, that again, you say, yeah, that’s right. OK, but Westerners say, OK, if you’re going to internalize the environmental externalities of production of energy from hydrocarbons, why don’t you do it for every other energy source? Sure, the hydro guys don’t produce a lot of CO2, except in the amount of concrete that they use. But they have flooded carbon sinks in Canada, the size of Lake Ontario. So where’s the reservoir tax for those guys? If you’re going to internalize the nuclear people don’t produce a lot of CO2, but they produce one of the deadliest poisons known to man on which this country has spent billions trying to figure out what to do with it afterwards. So where’s the radiation tax for those guys? Let’s treat every. Why do you think why do you think that inequality of internalizing externalized costs exists? Because it is peculiar if if it was driven purely by environmental concerns. I mean, you might say it’s it’s hyper concern over carbon per se, but that doesn’t account for not paying attention to the externalized cost of one of the reasons maybe I’m being a little political here. It’s one thing to penalize the population of Alberta through a carbon tax. It’s another thing to establish a reservoir tax for Quebec hydro politically, if you were the federal government. Now that would be a big challenge. Yeah, well, and it’s also you know, hydro has got a reputation like a low resolution representation reputation for being clean. Whereas Albert offers from this, you know, it’s tart and feathers, so to speak, with the oil sands. And so that’s a very difficult battle to fight. I mean, the Keystone cancellation seemed to be a reflection of that. Yeah. And in the end of the day, and I’m not saying at the end of the day that hydro might not all cost in might still be more effective, both environmentally and energy wise than hydrocarbons or solar or wind. But the difference will not be between black and white, between zero and a thousand. The difference between hydrocarbon energy and hydro energy will be between 600 and 700. And eventually, eventually this is going to catch up. I raise this with economists. I say, how can you argue about the merit of internalizing the negative environmental consequences of one form of energy and not to be consistent argue for it for every other form of energy? And they say, yeah, that’s right. But I don’t want to lead that crusade sooner or later to happen. And these consumers that have been told that this form of energy is cheaper and better environment are going to find out it’s not quite what they’ve been told. But we got onto this basically, this is this Western passion for equality and you can apply it in that area to the equalization. Well, and also the Western dependence, especially in Alberta, but also Saskatchewan to some degree, dependence on the oil patch and for its whole economic function. And then this freedom, like a lot of the people that populated the West came there for freedom from either tradition or for authoritarian regimes and that sort of thing is freedom, freedom, freedom. And that’s a big thing with a lot of Western, including a lot of the new Canadians, not just the old pioneers. But so they attach a lot of importance to those freedoms that are in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which in their view existed long before the Charter, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of belief, freedom of religion, freedom of the press. They have always blessed and believed in free trade, freedom of trade and opposed the tariffs and protective measures. They want to see domestic free trade. They say, how come we can negotiate a free trade agreement with the United States? And we have these barriers between trade, between provinces want freedom of trade, freedom of choice in social services. Why do we just have to have a semi monopolistic position in the health sector, in the education sector, in the social services sector? Why can’t we have a mixed system, public, private, charitable, and we get freedom to choose where we get our social services? This freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom, and anything that restricts that, including even the current restrictions due to COVID rub people the wrong way. They want to see balance between, okay, we’ve got to have health protection, but what’s the impact of that on my civil rights and freedoms? And where’s the balance between protecting my health and protecting my civil liberties? Where’s the balance between protecting the environment and protecting the economy on which my income depends? These are all, and I think if Canada gets into a federal election, which it’s predicted it will fairly soon, a lot of these political party people, no matter what party, conservatives, liberal, green, socialists, whatever, when they knock on the door, increasing number of people are saying, I want to know where you and your party stand on equalization. I want to know where you stand on freedom of civil liberties when they’re threatened by whatever. I want to know whether you believe in economic impact assessments of environmental measures, not just environmental impact assessments of economic measures. I want to know where you stand on domestic free trade. And if you can answer those questions, which are fueling this bottom up discontent, you can channel it into a constructive result. If you have no answer to it, or you ignore them, or you don’t know what they’re talking about, to listen to Justin Trudeau’s speeches, you wouldn’t get the idea. It’s a faintest idea that this is out there. It needs to be answered. You’re going to see more of this Western alienation. And in fact, one question I have for you, Jordan, given your professional background, like are there psychological roots to what a portion of the population is alienated, feels alienated, left out? I have an email from a young guy, just a young guy, saying, I don’t feel at home in my own country. And I’m leaving. He didn’t even know where he’s going. But I’m not staying here. I don’t feel at home. Is there a psychological dimension to alienation? And is there a prescription for how you deal with it other than what the person says is alienated? Well, it’s a good thing for us to discuss, because it does seem to me, although I wouldn’t say it’s precisely psychological, I think it might have more to do with education. Like, it seems to me that most young people and perhaps most citizens of Canada, and this might go for other democracies as well, believe that there is very little they can do about the state of affairs within traditional political systems. And my experience with traditional political systems hasn’t been that that’s the case. They’re generally screaming out for people to participate and desperate for it. So that’s true at the party level. It’s true at virtually every level. And so it’s not like the institutions are particularly opaque. I mean, you can’t just suddenly become prime minister, obviously. But there’s plenty of room for participation in the political process. And it isn’t clear to me that our citizens really know that or believe it. Yeah, that’s why I try to tell people that reform story, whether you agree with what reform was trying to achieve, the fact that a small number of people could start something that ended up ultimately with all kinds of changes and zigzags and reversals and forward moves for forming a government. This not only happened in the West. In Lester Pearson’s day when he was prime minister, there was a meeting of three or four guys in Montreal, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Gerard Peltier, Jean Marchand. And with the blessing of Pearson, they decided we’re going to make the Liberal Party an instrument to advance Quebec’s interest. Just three guys. They called them the three wise men from the West or the East. And by golly, they did it. So maybe more Canadians knew our story that our system does lend itself to change if you’ll get involved. One of the things I advocate in this book of mine, but I’m jumping all over the place, but I’ve heard hundreds and hundreds of political speeches over the years, and a lot of them, including many of my own, deserve to be forgotten. But one that sticks in my mind comes way back when I first ran for parliament in the 60s in Edmonton East, which was a multicultural rioting long before Toronto discovered the virtues of multiculturalism. And I was invited to a meeting of the Latvian society to celebrate their brief period of independence between the wars. And they had a speaker there, I think her name was Dr. Anna Rodolphex. And she gave this speech on the three great commandments of Western civilization. The first one was know thyself from Socrates and the Greek tradition. The second one was control thyself from the Hebrew lawgivers and the Roman lawgivers. And the third was give yourself from Jesus and Nazareth. And she elaborated and on that first point on know yourself, like know your country, know your people, and talking to politicians, know your constituents, know the people you’re supposed to be representing. And in the US, if you want to run for the Republicans or Democrats, they can give you a huge book. It’s about 500 pages long, giving the complete description of the history of the Democratic Party. I forget the name of it. And then there’s another one for the Republican. In Canada, there is no definitive history of the Liberal Party and the Liberal tradition in Canada. There’s no complete definitive history of the conservative tradition. Why do you think it is that the Americans are so much better at mythmaking and storytelling and history building than Canadians? I mean, they’re phenomenally good at it. I don’t know. We have people that are capable of doing it. We have historians that are as capable of doing that as the Americans, but we haven’t done it. And one of my challenges in my book is somewhere out there, there’s got to be some historians who can produce those four books, the Liberal one, the conservative one, the socialist one, and the third party traditions, because you can’t cover Quebec and Western politics without the third party tradition. And that would be enormously helpful in knowing ourselves. And you think a university might be interested in doing that? Well, I think you could find the funding for it. I think you could find the funding for it. It’s part of knowing yourself. I use the broad jump analogy. In the Olympics, there used to be an event called the standing broad jump, where you how far could you jump from a standing position? And the record was, I don’t know, eight feet or something was quite phenomenal. But then there’s the running broad jump, where the record is 27 or 28 feet or whatever it is. In other words, you can get ahead further if you get a run at it than if you start just from standing still. And I say that to people wanting to get into political office, there’s a whole history behind all of this. Get a run at it by knowing the background, the history and so forth, and you’ll get further than thinking politics just started the day you’ve discovered it and you do it from a standing start. And all that- No, a cynic with regards to your involvement in the political process, a cynic might say, well, you were born into a political family. And I presume that that also enabled you to avail yourself a variety of connections and so and also produces within you a kind of deep knowledge that would be a consequence of being within a family like that. I mean, so to what degree do you think your specialized family background, say played a determining role in your success and your ability to do this? I think it did. My father had a huge influence on me in that connection, but I would generalize from that experience. There’s a lot more can be said on that than just family background. You mentioned in my biography, we have 12 grandchildren. We actually have 13 now and a number of our boys who play hockey and a couple of them at very high level. So we, my wife and I have been to an infinite number of hockey games, kids’ games. And when they’re about 11 or 12, you go to the arena at seven o’clock in the morning, six thirty in the morning, there’s nobody there except the parents and the players. But if you look on the back row, you look on the back row of that arena, there’s a couple of guys with clipboards. Who are those guys? They’re scouts. They’re scouts. Some of them with NHL connections, scouting 11 and 12 year olds, trying to find somebody that maybe has the talent to play the national game at the national level. Now, where’s the political equivalent of that? If we want to improve the quality of democracy, the quality of your political party, in my case, the conservative party, where’s the scouts that are out there trying to find people? Not the day before they want to run for office, 10 years before, so that you can give them some experience, give them some of the training that I got at home, but other people can get through training programs. And I use this another analogy, the political watering hole analogy. Think of our House of Commons or the provincial legislature as a watering hole in the middle of the political jungle to which thirsty political animals gravitate. There are only certain paths that get to the watering hole. One of them is the family path. You had a family that was interested and involved in politics, and so you are, and you can come to that. That’s only one path. I came by that path, Justin Trudeau came by that path. There’s a lot of people come by that path, but there’s other paths. There’s the constituency path. You join a political party, you work in the constituency association, you become the vice president, you become the president, the member of parliament decides to retire, and you say, I could do that. And so you get to parliament or the legislature through the constituency path. Chris Warkenton, the member from Peace River, I think that’s, isn’t Fairview in Peace River your hometown? Chris was the head of his constituency association when he was 19 years of age, and Charlie Penson was a member of parliament, and Chris found out what it was all about. And Chris ended up when Charlie retired, becoming the member of parliament. There’s the civil service route. Mackenzie King was a civil servant who observed a lot of cabinet ministers and said, I can do what they’re doing better than they’re doing. Lester Pearson was a civil servant. He got to the watering hole through the civil service routes. There’s an advocacy group. And if you would trace these paths, there’s six or seven of them to the watering hole. If you can catch the thirsty political animal way upstream, if he’s 100 yards from the watering hole, he can smell the water, she can smell the water. I got there this far, I don’t need any help. I don’t need any training. But if you catch him through your recruitment and scouting system, if you catch him upstream, then you can provide the training and the background so that when they arrive there, they are better qualified to be a small D Democrat or to be a liberal or a conservative or whatever party affiliation, then if they never, there was no training or preparation until they were within 100 yards of the watering hole. I don’t know if that analogy holds. And when I got out of parliament, or Sandra says I should sound like I was in the penitentiary, but I left the parliament. One of the last things I did, I interviewed the speaker and the clerk of the House of Commons and each of the provincial legislatures in a couple of the territorial ones. And I asked them, I said, you have seen hundreds and hundreds of elected people come through here and you’ve seen the state of preparedness or unpreparedness of them. If you could prescribe courses to be given to those people so that they enter prepared, this is what Cicero wrote in his diary, you want to get in the Roman Senate, entrate parity, enter prepared. The guy took 10 years preparation, he was an ambitious son of a gun. And so they gave me this list, it’s in my Do Something book of about 30 different things, all the way from protocol to committee procedures to lawmaking. Some of them pointed out, to become a barista at Starbucks, you need 10 to 15 hours training to know the difference between a mocha and a latte, but you can become a lawmaker in the Parliament of Canada or in a legislation without one hour of training in lawmaking. So they gave me this long list. Eventually, I took it to Carleton University, Dr. Rosanna Runtow was the president at that time, and said, look, Carleton is in Ottawa, can you not put together a graduate course to provide some of this training for prospective members of parliament, but for legislative assistants, executive assistants, people in the political side who might become members. And she picked up the ball and they ended up creating this Riddell graduate program in political management, Clay Riddell, who was an oil patch guy in Calgary, she came out to see him. And she said, we’d like to present this program, we want some money from you. And she said, it’ll be nonpartisan because we can’t be in anybody’s pocket. So Clay said to her, and for which nonpartisan legislature, are you preparing things? I mean, what she meant was, we can’t be in any party’s politics, but he persuaded her, call it cross partisan, you don’t want to be in anybody’s pocket, but you’re going to cover all the party. So that program is still running, but it’s a drop in the bucket. And then at UBC, there’s a center for the study of democratic institutions under Max Cameron and Professor Baird, and they have an Institute for Future Legislature, they took five or six of those things from that list and they put on a summer school for people that want to get into politics. They’re working on a project to create Democracy House, a 100 seat replica, the House of Commons with all the trimmings and all the rooms and all the rest for would be people for training. And I know I’m rambling on and on, but I just think this necessity of preparing elected people better for public office when they get there is an enormously important investment. And we don’t make that investment the way we could or we should. What has the Manning Center for Democracy been doing? Well, I’m actually retired from that. Well, we were doing that. We were doing, trying to provide some of that training, putting on courses and putting on conferences. One of the weaknesses on the conservative side, it’s a congenital weakness of conservatives, perhaps because they tend to be entrepreneurial and independent. They operate in silos. The conservative think tanks do not do a lot together. They’re a little bit afraid of losing donors to the other think tank. The advocacy groups, they don’t do a lot together and sometimes they’ll plan advocacy campaigns almost on the same time period in the same place when it ought to be coordinated. So we put on these conferences and these networking events to try to get the different components of the conservative movement to at least know what each other do. The provincial political parties do very little in cooperation with each other and very little in cooperation with the federal party. So networking and conferencing, but not just conferencing for the sake of talking, conferencing for the sake of building relationships was one of our big objectives. And when I retired just a year ago, we handed that function off to another group that’s always been sympathetic to us called the Canada Strong and Free Network. It’s headed up by Troy Lanigan, who was a long time president of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. And Troy’s carrying on that same function that the Manning Center did, the conferencing and the networking function that’s on the conservative side. One of the other things we did, we detected, and you raised this with me in an email, what do you do for these younger people that are disillusioned with the whole process, politicians, parliament? I’ve heard young people say, I wouldn’t care if they shut the parliament down for five years, what difference does it make? And one of the problems with them is they do not identify with this left right center conceptualization of the political arena. And it’s a good question. I’ve had them ask me, how come the political arena is divided up in accordance with the seating arrangement after the French Revolution, when the landlords, the lords in that side on the right, and the workers guys sat on the left, that’s where that left right center comes from. Why are we still using that? So we put on these receptions for millennials. And when they came in the door, we had a bunch of posters around the room with different conceptual frameworks, not the traditional left right center, at least not that labeling. We had a democratic conceptual framework. Do you favor consultation with large numbers of people on public decisions and giving them a role in decision making? Or do you favor more expert opinion and small group deciding what’s best and communicate where are you on that axis? We give them stickers, put yourself on that axis. We had an environmental axis. Do you think environmental protection should be done essentially by government regulation, taxation, government initiatives? Or do you think there’s a role for market mechanisms and entrepreneurial? In a way, this has got a left right dimension to it, but it’s not quite as obvious and not stated in those terms. And we had a 15 or 16 of these alternative conceptual frameworks. And interestingly enough, they were a lot more interested in discussing and debating and placing themselves in that conceptual framework than if we had just had the old left right center when they say, well, I’m sort of a little bit on the left on the social and a little bit on the right on economic. And I guess I’m in the center and like, you know, it’s a very uninspiring discussion. So that’s the second thing I think that besides training is find conceptual frameworks that people can relate to and conduct your politics in that framework. On the communication side of that too, I keep coming back to communications because modern communication politics is so much communications. This asking this question out of whose mouth would this message be most credible? And this is a hard thing for politicians to ask because often your communications guy will say, not yours. People don’t respect political people today. So can you find someone else to say that who actually believes it that would be more credible with the audience? And a great illustration of this again, when I was a kid, my father gave me a long playing record by Edward R. Murrow. Does that name you? It was called I can hear it now. And it was extracts from famous speeches. And it had a speech by Woodrow Wilson after the First World War. He’s trying to convince Americans to support the League of Nations, which they were not too inclined to support. But his speech went like this. Oh, yeah, mothers who have lost their sons in France have come to me and have taken my hand and said, God bless you, Mr. President. I advise the Congress of the United States to create the situation that led to the deaths of their sons. My fellow citizens, would they pray God to bless me? Because they believe that their boys died for something which vastly transcended the immediate objects of the war. They believe, they believe, they believe. Now, what he’s saying is what he believes. But he’s put it in the mouths of mothers who had lost their sons in France. This, if you can’t actually get someone else to say what you want to say that is more credible, at least you could do it through that transference message in the speech. And again, these are techniques that can be taught and practiced in a way that then inspires more participation. People can relate to it, you know, but there’s a lot of work to be done to do that. Well, you wrote this entire book recently on ways to participate in ways to improve democracy. What can you step us through that to a greater degree? When you look at the democratic processes in Canada, and perhaps in the West in general, what else do you see that needs to be improved and how? Well, I would almost come back to some of the things I’ve said already, recruiting better people. And I know that’s being pejorative, but recruiting better people who’ve got some other reason and self-interest to get into the political recruitment system, a scouting system. How can we have a scouting system for the NHL and we can’t have for the Parliament of Canada, the legislature, recruiting people, and you have to deal with their objections. I’ve been involved in candidate recruitment my entire life. And the biggest single reason given now for not being involved is people’s very good people, competent people, people make a contribution say, I will not subject myself and my family to the abuse that I’m going to get, particularly through the media and the social media. So you have to address those types of questions. And then I say, okay, you got recruitment, then training, preparation. I have a list of 20 questions a lawmaker should ask. And these are not, we’re not talking like a lawyer about the law. We’re talking about a law, someone who makes the laws different than a lawyer. And there’s certain questions that got to be asked about a bill. What’s the story behind it? You make a big point in your recent book about the importance of stories. What’s the story behind the, why is this here? Should this Parliament even be considering this? Does the bill state the purpose of the law you’re trying to pass? And does it state it in the bill, not in the preamble? Because our courts have dismissed declarations of purpose that are in the preamble. They can’t dismiss it within the bill. There’s a whole bunch of, what’s the social impact of this? What’s the economic impact? What’s the administrative cost of this? There’s about 20 questions you should ask about if you’re going to be a lawmaker. But that’s not, that’s not taught. But so the recruitment, the training, and then a big emphasis on this communication aspect, the small D Democrat, receiver, oriented communicator, rather than the source oriented communicator. These are all things that can be taught. And then there’s special subjects under this revitalizing democracy. One that I raise is, how are you going to handle relations between the science community and the political community? This is becoming a big thing. And this COVID, every government claims that their policy is science based. And I’ve just written an op-ed actually suggesting that the scientists themselves should become the primary communicator in the public space of their science. Do not surrender that to political actors, to bureaucratic actors, even if they have a science degree, or to media commentators exclusively, because they even unintentionally will have a biased interpretation. They will use the science that supports for their preconceived notions. And they’ll ignore the stuff that does science, but you got to work on that. How do we improve the relations between science and the political community? And then the last thing I get into is, what can you say to faith oriented people as to how to participate in the political arena? And on that, I go back to the New Testament, but the historians say that Jesus of Nazareth, he only had three and a half years of public work. The first year, he had this motley crew of fishermen and tax collectors, shepherds, whatever they were. They didn’t do anything except follow them around and see what he did and see what he said. But about a year in, he decided it’s going to send them out to do some public work in his name. But there’s this whole passage in Matthew where it gives an instruction. And the key instruction was be wise as serpents and gracious as doves, which are powerful analogies in the Jewish lexicon, that wise as a serpent. The serpent was the symbol of the devil. Is it be as wise as the forces of evil? And the dove was the symbol of the spirit of God, be as gracious as the spirit of God. And so I say, if you’re a believer, and this doesn’t just apply to Christians, if you’re a faith oriented person participating in democratic politics, be wise in how you do it and be gracious. And I always add, he did not say be vicious as snakes and stupid pigeons, which some of us have a faith background are capable of doing. So these are all recruitment, training, special training for on the science side of the religious side. These are all things that could be done to, I think, to strengthen democracy. Well, let’s talk a little bit about the last detour that the conversation took. And you’ve done a fair bit of work on navigating the faith political interface. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that I think people of faith has have major things they can contribute. One is in this area of lawmaking. If one wants to read a treatise on the attempt to achieve conflict resolution and peace and prosperity through the rule of law, you cannot read a more thorough book than the than the Hebrew scriptures, the Christian Old Testament. Because what was that all about? There was a proclamation of the law of God through Moses, the 10 commandments, you get you have a good description of that in non religious language in that book, that last book of yours. And then you have a 400 year experiment trying to make people righteous by applying the rule of law with drastic penalties, proclaimed for breaking it and enormous blessings promised for keeping. But what was the conclusion of the latter day prophets that you couldn’t make people righteous by law alone, unless it could be internalized, unless it was written, as Isaiah said, this is Zechariah or somebody, unless the law can be written on the tablets of the heart. It’s no good just having it on tablets of stone or parchment or in statute books and the revised statutes of Canada. Like that, that’s an enormous lesson. The benefits of law and the rule of law, it’s extremely important, but it has limits. And that’s something that people of faith, particularly Christians or Jewish people that understand that that’s enormous contribution you can make. And particularly in these parliaments and legislations today, we’ve got people that think you can solve every problem by some action of government or some law of government that that would be a contribution that they could make. And then law has to reflect the spirit of the people that it serves. Otherwise, it would be just an imposition from outside, right? So it has to be part of this conversation that we’ve been talking about continually. Yeah. And then then if you go to the New Testament, okay, okay, so you can’t reconcile people to God or to each other by the rule of law alone. So what do you got? The New Testament, you’ve got a different approach, self-sacrificial mediation, a mediator for one thing, who incorporates both sides of the problem and the vertical, the mentioning he’s God and he’s man. He, this is the very opposite of a judicial mediator who is distant, who has to keep himself distant from the parties. No, this mediator integrates both of them. He’s on both sides. So how do you understand that both religiously and politically? Well, I can give you a sort of a hubris example of born from my consulting practice. One of the things that I got involved in trying to reconcile some conflicts between oil companies and Aboriginal groups, Gulf oil had a heavy oil. This is a long time ago. So my details maybe should not as correct as they should be, but they had a heavy oil pilot plant at Wabaskaw, north of Lesser Slave Lakes, south and east of Fairview, where you came from. And there was a big Aboriginal band there, the Big Stone Band, and there was going to be tensions between the oil company and the Aboriginals. And so the guy in charge of the project, his name was Norm. He was a principal guy who I really admired, except he used to swear all the time and his favorite epitaph was Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ. I think he knew that bothered me. But anyway, one day Norm says, we got to hire somebody to help deal with this potential coming conflict between us and the Big Stone Band. And he said, I want suggestions from all of you. I was a consultant and there was others there. And so a few weeks later, he says, well, I’ve got the suggestions back, the legal people want a legal beagle because they say this is going to get into court and they want somebody that can handle the legal aspects of the treaty relationship and the contract with the band and everything else. They want a legal beagle. He says, the PR people want a pretty face that can explain all this on television and smooth it all over. And he says, and Manning here, because I had recommended a Métis guy that I knew in the community who hunted and fished with the Big Stone Boys and but who had also done contract work and was well respected by Gulf. I recommended an in between guy who incorporated both sides of the question. And so Norm says, and Manning here wants me to hire Jesus Christ. And then he says, OK, so what we’re going to do, we’re going to take all the candidates down to the Athabasca River, the first one that could walk across the top. But, but, you know, but normally what I was getting at, yes, you can get a defender on one side or the other from the PR standpoint or legal standpoint, or you can try to find a mediator who actually internalizes this conflict. And I think that person can play that reconciliation role better than the person from one side or the other. That’s maybe not the best illustration. And what do you mean by internalizing the conflict? Well, in effect, the example of Jesus of Nazareth, like he took upon himself the sins of the people and sacrificed himself in order to satisfy the demands of the other party. And I think in this third party reconciliation, maybe maybe by a mediator and the difficulty in it is that the mediator pays the price of the reconciliation, pays a big portion of the price of the reconciliation. You’ll be misunderstood by both sides and both come after him. And maybe that’s why it’s not such attractive profession. But I think that’s what practicing what Jesus of Nazareth was talking about the self-sacrificial media. Can you sacrifice your own interest in order to bring these two parties together? And that’s in the name of a higher virtue in the name of peace or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And ending the conflict guy. And in that book, I also get into issue campaigns. I’m a great believer in issue campaigns. We talk about training people for political involvement. One is through formal training and courses and everything else. The other is participating in an issue campaign like reform. The year before reform elected its 52 members to the Canadian parliament that 1993, there was this referendum campaign on the Charlotte town constitutional accord, where this constitutional accord was put together and Canadians were to vote on yes or no, do you want this? And so there’s a referendum campaign. So now we got all involved in that. And because it involves all the same things as an election campaign, virtually, you got to give speeches, you got to prepare material, you got to knock on doors, you got to distribute material, you got to handle criticism and opposition. It’s almost the same as an election campaign. And that for us was a training ground for the 1993 election. We train constituency workers, we train candidates, we train spokesperson by participating in that issue campaign. And coming back to the faith political, if you want one wants to study issue campaigns, the classic issue campaign in the British parliamentary tradition is Wilberforce’s anti-slavery campaign. It is an absolute classic. Every mistake that could be made was made. Every innovation in trying to win a campaign was made in that case. And it was very much motivated by people with a Christian perspective. So it’s very instructive to faith, oriented people, even the way Wilberforce introduced the first motion in the house of British House of Commons that it considered this issue. The moralists at that time, like the moralists today, they wanted him to ride into the House of Commons on a white charger and just denounce slavery as an abomination from hell and anybody connected with it ought to have their head chopped off. That’s what the moralists want to do. Let’s place this historically. So this is taking place in Great Britain at what point? The late 1700s. Yeah. Well, this is a very germane discussion because there’s so much discussion right now about the idea of slavery being built into the United States, for example. And so this is a great historical story. Oh yeah. And it’s an alternative. Americans, our US friends, Americans tried for 30 years by every other conceivable way to somehow come to grips with the slavery issue, but it didn’t work and ended up in war, where in Britain they managed to do that. And while Wilberforce was told and tempted to ride into the white house, the parliament on a white horse. He was supposed to be like wielding the sword of moral righteousness as a shining exemplar or something like that. But his friend, Pitt, William Pitt, the younger was the prime minister then. The guy became prime minister at age 24, 26. And Pitt was his friend. And Pitt, I think, told, I don’t know if I can prove this from the records, but I think Pitt told him, you do that. And this issue will not be discussed in this house for another 20 years. You take that, you’ll offend. Why was he able to say that? Why did he know that that wouldn’t work, do you think? Well, there was so many British economic interests tied to slavery that if you come in crusading like that, you’re not going to get anywhere, particularly in the House of Lords, which was even more prominent then than the House of Commons. So was the danger there, the exhibition of moral superiority, do you think? And I think it was a threat to economic interests that would just shut it down. But Wilberforce responded by this resolution. And you can read it. I’ve got it in my book somewhere that this house gives consideration to the circumstances surrounding the slave trade. He didn’t even go to slavery itself. He went to the slave trade, something less. And just that the house give consideration to the circumstances. And you can see his moral compatriots and what a mealy muffed resolution is that. But he got it passed. He got it passed. The House said, I don’t like this stuff, but I guess it can’t do any harm. And that incremental way. And then, of course, that there was a 50 year campaign. But in the end of the day, eight hundred and fifty thousand enslaved people throughout the British British Empire were declared free. And it’s a classic case in issue campaign with a moral, with a very moral dimension to it. Right. Well, and you you you you prefaced that story with the idea of the mediator who takes the battle on inside himself in some sense. And so how do you see that playing out in the case of Wilberforce? You’re the claim. And this is obviously not a claim that’s limited to you, that it was Wilberforce’s Christianity that that influenced his opposition to slavery. And how do you understand that opposition as well and its relationship with Christianity? Well, I say I think the opposition to this, I think was coming mainly from economic interest and then from political people to say, if I if I’m on that side, I’m going to lose my seat the next time around. So you had that motivation. But Wilberforce took an enormous amount of abuse for all this. Like he tried to take this sort of moderate view. And so he was lambasted by the zealots on his own side. And then he because what he’s proposing is something that’s offensive to the more ruling class economically and politically, he’s he offends them. And he’s denounced on both sides. But he takes that on. That’s what’s going to happen if you’re this this mediator in between. They lost motion after motion. They lost one motion by by six or eight votes because the some of the members went off to have a drinking party or something and just a discouragement. But they managed to triumph in the end. And I think there’s a model in that campaign as to how to conduct issue campaigns, particularly on moral and ethical issues, and particularly from a faith perspective is that one’s perspective. And so, okay, so let’s let’s focus again on this on the motivation that Wilberforce had as a consequence of his belief. Like, what was it that inspired him to work for that length of time and under those conditions against slavery? What what was the central belief? Do you think that he was trying to put forward? Well, I don’t know it is morally wrong, but it was an established part of society at that point. So and of course, slavery has existed in many forms for virtually forever. So what was the what was the inspiring idea that enabled him to do that and enabled it to work? Well, he seemed to be very much motivated by suffering any evidence of suffering, not just slavery, like he founded another society for dealing with poverty, another society for dealing with cruelty to animals, the guys seem to be very touched and motivated by any instance of slavery above suffering. And of course, slavery was a great example of it. And then I think from his Christian perspective, he was convinced there was such a evil was a reality that there is such a thing as evil, and it has to be combated and it can become institutionalized. And I think his conception of evil on the negative side and his desire to alleviate suffering on the positive side, the two of those seem to combine to to motivate him. Well, it’s it seems to me as well that in Christianity, I don’t think it’s limited necessarily to Christianity, but you see it very well developed in Christianity is the idea that every human being has something about them that’s of eternal and transcendent value. And that political systems, economic systems, any other system has to take that into account when when it’s operating. Otherwise, that’s the transgressing against something that’s of fundamental and primary importance. That’s a very it’s a remarkable idea. Yeah. But you pay a price for trying to go down that down that route, you know, and maybe that’s why it’s not many take it. So you you met with a very small number of people to begin with when you were when you had decided to do do whatever it was necessary to produce a political party. Had you planned in fact on producing a party? Did that emerge across time? At this first meeting, there were five people at it. One was Dr. David Elton, who was the head of the Canada West Foundation, which did work on Western issues. But David was also a pollster. And David said, Look, as a pollster, I can I can’t tell you that there is a market for a new party. In fact, what I can tell you is there’s no apparent there’s no apparent market for a new party. He was sympathetic to what we were doing, but that was his contribution. Jim Gray was at that meeting, a very prominent oil person who was opposed to creating a new party because he knew the free trade issue was coming up, being promoted by the Maloney government. He was afraid that any new initiative in the West would split the free trade vote. And he was very much in favor of free trade, as was I. So he had that worry. Ted Byfield, who was the head of the Alberta report, Ted was sick that day and was there in spirit. But Ted was all for doing whatever you had to do to get attention and get these issues addressed. And there were two oil patch lawyers there, two who basically said, Well, whatever you think we should do, we should do. So anyway, the group couldn’t agree on a course of action other than why don’t we have a small conference somewhere out of Alberta, actually in Vancouver, so it’s not just a Alberta thing and put the options to the people we can get there. Do we work within a new party? Do we create a new advocacy pressure group of some kind? If we work within a party, what party? And what about this third party option, which is part of the Western tradition? And what were the issues that were driving them and you at the time, the primary issues? Well, the angst in the oil patch about the National Energy Program that’s confiscated $100billionworthofwealthfromtheWesternprovinces.TheCF-18issue,peoplewo{n}^{\prime }trememberwhatthatwas,buttherewasamaintenancecontractthatwaswonbyBristolAircraftinWinnipeg.Anditwastakenawayfromthem,despitethefactthattheywerethelowestbidderandbestpreparedtodoitandgiventoaMontrealfirm.Therewasalltheseirritants.Andthentherewasapproachinga$50 billion deficit to which this is under a conservative government. This is something that fiscal conservatives were concerned about. And then the West perennial complaints about the Senate, our Senate, unelected, unaccountable, ineffective, no adequate representation from Western Canada. This was all boiling around there. And the creation of separatist parties were being created in Western Canada, separatists elected a member to the Alberta legislature. So all of this is boiling around, just creating unrest. So the only conclusion we could come from this meeting is let’s have another meeting, very Canadian. And so we had this conference in Vancouver and people made the arguments for the different. I actually wrote to Moroni, the prime minister at the time, and said, look, this Western alienation is going to get out of hand. It’s going to cost you politically. Why don’t you send your best guy to argue that the federal conservative party is still the best vehicle for addressing these discontents? And I even suggested your best guy to do that would be Don Mazinkowski, who was his finance minister, he’s from Alberta, very respected, and very respected by myself and most of the rest of it. And Moroni wrote back and said, I will not send Mazinkowski or anybody, you guys have already decided you’re going to create a new party, which wasn’t true. I didn’t know what was going to happen. And he said, not only will I not send Mazinkowski, I will forbid any of my members, including my Western members from attending any such meeting, which was precisely the wrong thing to do anyway. So we had this conference in Vancouver, and somebody argued for working within the existing party, somebody argued for creating a pressure group or advocacy group. And there was a couple of other options. And I made the speech in favor of the West has created new parties to do this, what we want to do, and they could do it again. And they took a vote and the new party option won. And they passed a resolution to have a founding convention in Winnipeg short time after. And that’s how it got off the ground. So what made you convinced that there was enough discontent, say in the West, that this was the right time to act? Well, because I’ve been waiting around for 20 years watching all this. And I use a consulting firm to chase political issues and keep track of things, do polling and everything else. And when I was in university, when I was in university, I started out in physics, and then I couldn’t handle the math. So I went into economics where you can make the math work by changing it. But Joe, the real political actors then talk about upstream, Joe Clark was the leader of the Progressive Conservative Club on campus. Jim Coots, who became the principal secretary to Pierre Le Trudeau was the liberal leader. Grant Notley, who became the leader of the NDP in Alberta was the leader of the NDP on campus. And Joe used to try to convince me, Joe was committed to the Conservatives. He wouldn’t say the Conservatives were perfect or anything, but he was concerned, I’m going to try to make them better and all the rest. And he tried to persuade me to, you ought to throw in your lot with us. And I said, no, I think I’ll wait. I think the West, this is way back. I think the West is going to produce something new one of these days. And I think I’ll wait around for that. Now this took 20 years for that to happen. But I kind of had that feeling and partly from my study of the of the Western political tradition and our own family’s tradition. My father was part of the last wave, the Depression Party, creation of political parties. So I just had this feeling that was going to, the West was going to produce a new party. And then by the late 1980s, it was the time it was right. Now, the thought that derives from this, it’s hard to reform with conceptualize as being right wing, but there were polls taken with Canadians of are you right wing or left wing? They’re taken today, only maybe 13 to 15% ever say that they’re right wing. And only 12% say they’re left wing in any kind of extreme sense. They all say they’re moderate, you know, why did the Canadian cross the road to get to the middle? So and reform, I mean, while it was conservative, it was advocating change, which is often seen as incompatible with conservatism. We wanted to balance the budget, which was different than what had been done. We wanted to reform the Senate. We wanted freer votes in the parliament. These were all political innovations that were hardly conservative in a sort of a traditional sense. But since then, I keep thinking on how can you strengthen the conservative positions, conservative contributions to a better candidate and a better democracy. And there’s a more up to date list on that. One of the things I think conservatives have to do is distinguish between the conservative party and the conservative movement. I use in the book, I use this triangle, say the parties at the top, it’s the one that gets elected to the legislation of the parliament. But underneath it are the think tanks and generators of intellectual capital. The political parties generate very little intellectual capital. So they got no time, they got no inclination. Somebody else has to do it. Well, the conservative think tanks can do that, but they got to be more vigorous and better funded, etc. There’s advocacy group, the party can only crusade on certain things, but there’s advocacy groups that can crusade on, you know, if you want to get a mixed public and private healthcare system, then somebody else got a crusade on that, the parties will pick it up if it gets enough public support. So there’s all this infrastructure underneath the think tanks, advocacy groups, communicators, fundraisers, recruiters, trainers, and all that. And I argue that the stronger that movement is, the stronger, the better the party will perform. And so a lot of my subsequent work has been on trying to strengthen the movement. The another concept that we introduce is this political realignment, that from time to time, conservatives have to fundamentally shift in some way. And that this is not incompatible with being conservative. Edmund Burke used to talk about this. I mean, he’s considered our arch conservative theorist in many respects, but he said conservative and change have to co-exist, because the conditions change. And so in order to conserve the principle, you have to change. And I used to illustrate this, I did this community development work in North Central Alberta. And on an old road east of the slave lake, there used to be a sign, a great big heavy post with a crossboard on it with one word on it, saw ridge and an arrow pointing west, it was pointing towards the town of Saw Ridge. And that sign never changed its message, it never changed its direction, never changed its position, no matter how the wind blew or how much snow. But if you follow the directions on that sign, you would never get to the town of Saw Ridge. Well, why was that? Because that town changed its name, it changed its location after a flood in the 1930s, the roads to get there were changed to half a dozen times. So the very conservatism of that sign, it’s unmoving in its commitment, we’re always saying the same thing, we’re always putting with an error rather than pointing to the truth. And so this need for fundamentally realigning conservatives with the times has become a way we advocate a reform was a form of that trying to get that realignment change the old progressive. So what do you what do you see as the central tenants of updated conservatism? And what sort of attraction do you think they might have or could have for people who are curious about the political endeavor, philosophical endeavor, etc. distinguish that from the liberals or the progressives? Well, I think that’s a very important point. I think there’s been some just trying to be a pale imitation of the liberals or NDP does not get you anywhere. I think the challenge is to present distinctive alternatives. And the area I think the conservatives in the US are struggling with that at the moment, too, especially the moderate conservatives, yes, you know, the people who occupy that huge majority that you described that are not committed to the left or the right. There’s a number of things going to be done. What one is, I know this is getting repetitive. One is to harness some of these populist forces rather than oppose them or distance them from. And if you want an example of that, Boris Johnson in Britain, the Conservative Party has internalized that Brexit philosophy, which is a bottom up populist thing. Instead of opposing it, they become the champion of it. So figure out what some of these roots of the current populism, particularly in the West, this Western alienation and address it rather than distance yourself from it or say we don’t want to deal with that. That’s one thing that can be done. A second thing is, I think, to refresh conservative language, even on this balancing budgets and fiscal things, conservatives said the same things over and over and over again, the old languages, you need to refresh the language. There’s other ways of saying balancing the budget than saying we’re going to slash spending, we’re going to make more productive use of the dollar of the taxpayer, but find some way to refresh your language. Adopt a green conservatives. I think conservatives have to get, I’ve been slow to get onto the environmental issues, but offer a distinction from what the liberals and the greens and the socialists are. Mainly use market mechanisms to address environmental conservation as distinct from just nothing but government regulation on top of government regulation. I think there’s things that can be done there. There’s additional, as I mentioned, with respect to getting young people, if you don’t talk to young people in terms of the old left, right center spectrum, but adopt some of the conceptual frameworks, your language, adopt conceptual frameworks that are more in the heads of those younger people. Offering a different approach to poverty. The other side has one standard approach to dealing with poverty, income redistribution through progressive taxation. That’s basically the approach to poverty by the liberals and the socialists and even the greens. And conservatives can offer an alternative, which is basically a better distribution of the tools of wealth creation, which conservatives know a lot about, access to capital, micro capital, access to technology, access to markets that ordinary people don’t have before. And I think of ordinary people don’t have before. And I spent 20 years trying to do this in that North Central Alberta area. And I know that approach can work. That area of Alberta was, my father did some studies last year asking why were certain areas of Alberta not prospering the way that most of the rest of the province was. And one of the areas was that big North Central area between Fort McMurray and the oil sands in the Peace River country on the west. And one day we had this sort of consulting firm, a small group of guys from the town of Slave Lake came in and said, we want to establish a community development company with two objectives. One is it’s got to earn a return on the capital that’s invested. So it’s a capitalist institution, but we want to undertake projects that have got social benefit to this community. In particular, we need rental housing for some of the workers that are coming in. And there’s absolutely nothing here. We want a dual, what would be called a social enterprise today was what they were talking about. And they asked us to, I’d given speeches on this. So they came to us and we agreed to help. And so we created this company called Slave Lake Developments Limited. We sold shares, common shares at a dollar a share. It took 18 months to raise $100,000.Peopleneverownedashareinanything.TheSecuritiesCommissionsaid,whyonearthwouldyoubeusingthismechanismtoraise$100,000? Said, this is an education exercise as much as it is a capital raising exercise. And so we managed to get some money. And then we established contacts between these people with some of the oil companies that were moving into the area that they didn’t have. And not contacts with the field people, contacts with the head offices in Calgary. We had the connections there. So we give them contacts. All of this is distributing tools of wealth creation. We talked, I know I’m rambling on, but one day in our little consulting firm, we got a phone call. I got a phone call from Bill Twaits, the president of Imperial Oil. Well, you knew my dad, I think that’s why I called the office. Anyways, it says, I hear you, my Calgary people say you’re trying to get a social investment out of Imperial Oil. It says we don’t have a social investment policy. What are you trying to do? Well, I explained to him, this is a real estate project. Go to our real estate guys. I said, no, because I know what return your real estate guy wants and this project will give it. Well, he says, if it’s a charity thing, go to our charity guys. I said, no, we’ve been telling these people there’s another way to raise money than going around with your handout to the government or to a donor. No, we want an investment from you. You’re going to get a 6% return on it, but there’s going to be a social benefit, which will actually benefit you too, because some of your workers don’t have a place. So Tweet says, well, we don’t have a policy on that. I’ll have to take it to the board. He said, and I pull in my leg. I could just imagine the board of Imperial Oil considering a $25,000investmentinslavery.Soanyway,theguycallsbackanothertwoweeks.Hesays,mypeople,Iknowh{e}^{\prime }dnevercomeintotheboard.Hesays,mypeoplesaytogiveyouthemoney.Hesays,andIknowyo{u}^{\prime }regoingtorunaroundCalgarysayingyougotasocialinvestmentoutofImperialOil,butIwantyoutoknowwhathisvoiceisasfaras{I}^{\prime }mconcerned,i{t}^{\prime }scharityandheslammedthelegdown.Anyway,wegotthisprojectgoing.Itgotgoing.Theprojectgotbuilt.Thecommunitycompanyearnedenoughtobeabletopayofftheoilcompany.WeputonalittledinnerinCalgaryfortheoilcompanies.ItwasImperialMobileRainbowPipeline.Andweputtothankthem.Andwetookpictures.Her{e}^{\prime }syouroriginal$25,000 getting back. Here’s your 6% dividend. We took pictures. Well, Dingell was the Imperial guy. We sent these to Tweet and said, here’s your getting your money back. Here’s your dividend. And I added it. And it ain’t charity. And then the ironic thing at the end of this dinner, Ed Braden, who is the mobile representative came to me and says, this is all very nice. But it creates a bit of a problem for us. We all treated it as a charity and wrote it off. So the accountants won’t know what to do with these checks. So is there some charitable project up there that you can give it back? And so the money went around twice. But to make a long story short, what we did was just give them the tools of wealth creation and talk to provincial government instead of building a little provincial building in every town in the province. In this case, why don’t you give them a 20 year lease for 40,000 square feet that they can take to a financial company and get a mortgage, the first big commercial mortgage in the town? Like, why don’t you do that? And we got that. And anyway, I was president of the company for a number of years to get it off the ground. And I had to leave when we got into the political business and they ended up getting professional management. And they branched out from slave lake. They didn’t want all their eggs in one basket. They got a whole bunch of projects. 40, 45 years later, whatever, they still had these basic shareholders. Nobody could own more than 10% of the company. They had these 300 local shareholders. They sold the company for $55millionanddistributedthatamongthoseshareholders.Nowtha{t}^{\prime }safairamountofmoney.Andthatisaddressingapovertystrickenarea.Butbythattime,itwas{n}^{\prime }tpovertystricken.Butitwasaccomplishedbythedistribution,betterdistributionofthetoolsofwealthcreationasdistinctfromjusthandingthemmoneyfromapottha{t}^{\prime }sbeenraisedthroughprogressivetaxation.Andwhyca{n}^{\prime }tconservativeschampionthatapproachtopovertyalleviationasadistinctiveoftheconservativemovement?Andso{I}^{\prime }vegotawholelistofthingslikethatthatIthinkconservativescoulddothatwouldadvancethecauseandaddresstheproblemsfacingthecountry.SoIwanttoaskyoualittlebitmoreaboutthedevelopmentoftheparty.Youtalkedaboutthefoundingconvention.Le{t}^{\prime }sgofromthere.AndthenIwanttoaskyouaboutyourviewofCanadacurrently.Well,yeah,thenthebuildtheparty,likewedid{n}^{\prime }thavealotofmoney.Andsowehadto,wehadtodoitthroughalotofpublicmeetings.Eventually,afterIgottoOttawa,becausew{e}^{\prime }restillbuildingthepilotpartyafterthat,w{e}^{\prime }retryingto,theideawastocreateanationalparty,notjustawesternparty.Andtheconstitutionofthepartyalsohadasunsetclauseinitthatitwouldcometoanendin10years.AndIwantedthatbecauseIknewthispoliticalrealignmentprinciplethatafter10years,however,w{e}^{\prime }dsetitupinthebeginningwasgoingtohavetochangefundamentally.Andsotherewasthatsunsetclause.Andtha{t}^{\prime }swhatallowedustocreatetheCanadianAllianceasthenextiterationofthething,becausethepartyhadtodecidewhethertocontinueinitscurrentform,dosomethingelse.Butthepromote,bythetimewegottoOttawa,w{e}^{\prime }restilltryingtopromoteasanationalparty.Myschedulewas50daysayearathomeinCalgary,100daysayearinOttawa,and200daysontheroadforyearafteryearafteryear.Andwehadsomeverygoodstaffpeopleandpeopleonourboardthatmadehugesacrificesinordertodothat.Buti{t}^{\prime }sabigcountry,withcrusadefromEastPointofNewfoundlandtoTolfinoinBCfromCoots,AlbertatotheYukon.Butitwasbasicallydonebygrassrootsorganization,publicmeeting.Andwhenafteryoucreatedtheparty,youenteredthefirstelection,whatweretheconsequencesinthefirstelection?Thefirstelectionweranin19,thepartywasonlyformedin1987.Sowethenextelectioncamein1988.Thatwasafreetradeelection.Andweran72candidates,noneofthemwon.Wefinishedsecondin11or12seats.Andtherewasarealquestion,isthisworthcarryingon?Wegotsomesupport,butnotenoughtoelectanybody.AndthenaconservativememberthathadbeenelectedintheridingofBeaverRiverinAlbertapassedaway.Theguyhadcanceranddid{n}^{\prime }tsurvivemorethanacoupleofmonthsaftertheelection.Sotherewasaby-election.Andwehadacandidatethere,talkaboutagrassrootsbottom-uppartynamedDeborahGray.AndshewasaschoolteacherontheFrogLakeReserve,whichisoneoftheverydepressedreservesinAlberta,howshecouldcontributewhatshecontributedthereisamiracleinitself.Andshewasourcandidateinthegeneralelection.Shefinishedsecond.Andthenthequestion,shouldIastheleaderruninthatby-election,becausewewouldhaveagoodchanceofgettingit.Peoplecantakeachanceinaby-electionbecausei{t}^{\prime }snotgoingtoupsetanything.Orshouldshe?Butshewasverypopular,veryarticulate.AndshewasasmallDDemocrat.DeborahisasmallDDemocrat.Yes,sh{e}^{\prime }sconservativeinthat,butherdominantphilosophyisasmallDDemocrat,peopl{e}^{\prime }sunderstanding,peopl{e}^{\prime }srepresentative.AndsoDeborahcontestedtheby-electionandwewon.SonowwegotoneseatintheParliamentofCanadarepresentedbyDeborahGrayandStephenHarper,whowasourpolicychief.ButwegotStephenwas,wehadnomoney.SoIsaid,wherearewegoingtogetapolicychief?Weca{n}^{\prime }tpayhimanything.Butitoccurredtomegraduatestudentsatuniversity,the{y}^{\prime }reexploitable.SoIcalledtheDr.BobMansell,whowasaneconomistattheUniversityofCalgary,whom{I}^{\prime }ddoneworkwith,Isaid,Bob,wh{o}^{\prime }syoursmartesteconomicstudent,graduatestudentthatmightbewillingtogoonapoliticaladventure?Andhegavemeonename,StephenHarper.SoStephenbecameourpolicychief.AndthenwhenDeborahwon,Stephenwentwithherasherexecutiveassistant,butasourmainstaffpersoninOttawa.Andthethinggotofftheground.Andshetookanenormousamountofabuse.Anditmakesmemadinretrospect,particularlytoheartheliberalstalkabouthowtheywouldchampionwomenbeinginvolvedinpolitics.TheydideverythingintheirpowertodefeatAgnesCampbellMacPhail,thefirstmemberofparliament.AndtheywereasabusivetoDeborahasyoucouldpossiblybe.Ifaconservativesaidthingsthattheysaidtoheraboutaliberalfemalecabinetminister,the{y}^{\prime }dbecensoredalloverthecouncilculturewouldcomebefore.AndsoDeborahputupwithalotofabuse.Wewereonthisfiscalresponsibilitything.Shetooka10$22 million on the campaign, each worth $11 million. They didn’t like that. But that’s how it got off the ground. And then we’re constantly trying to do this coalition building. So then I could tell we weren’t going to go much further with reform. So we created this conservative reform alliance. And basically, Steve McLaughlin That was with the leftovers, so to speak, of the conservative party. Stephen Kupnick No, this was basically with provincial allies, with the Klein conservatives in Alberta, with the Philman conservatives in Manitoba, and the Harris conservatives, particularly Mike Harris was very helpful to us, and the Harris conservatives in Ontario. And that created the Canadian alliance. And then so I lost the leader. I kept pushing the envelope on all this stuff. And I was losing, there’s always people who were opposed to these changes. And by the time it got to the leadership of the alliance, and we’ve been campaigning in the election campaigning for changes, constant campaigning, I then the joke was that the operation was a success, but the doctor died. And it was to stop well, they became the leader of the alliance, it didn’t go too well for stock. And then Harper came back and became the leader of the alliance. And he and Peter McKay, whom we talked to before, but Peter would never come in. But they got together and managed to put together the new Conservative Party of Canada. So it’s from those very humble beginnings, one seat ended up with a majority government majority conservative government in 2010. Right. And that was under that was under Harper under Harper. Yeah. Yeah. And so what were the consequences of that for Canada? Do you think what what did that accomplish? Well, you had to change the direction on a number of things. Stephen Harper is basically an economist has always been he has a better grasp of public finance in the economy than I would argue than anybody in that current federal cabinet. He’s had a fixation with it is his master’s thesis was on whether there was a connection between the bank rate and the election cycle. Not many people understand that subject. But his question was, did the bank liberalize credit in an election year in order to kind of make grease the wheels a little bit for whoever was proposing what, you know, which is an interesting thesis. But so he made a major effort to balance the keep the budget balance because we got the budget balance under under Gretchen. There wasn’t enough pressure on the liberals to they finally had to come around to do that. But Stephen got sidetracked or affected by the downturn in 2008, 2009. I think I’ve got my years right. So they got knocked off their budget balancing path for a while. He negotiated a whole bunch of free trade arrangements with not just with the United States, with a number of other countries, he endeavored to change the equalization to be a little more favorable to the West. He pushed Senate reform as far as you could push it until a Supreme Court says you cannot amend the constitutional references to the Senate without the approval of seven of the provinces with 60% of the population. So he did a number of things. And there’s been complaints from conservatives about the Harper administration. Why didn’t you do more for the West? And I went to lunch with Stephen one time and put that question to him. And he responded in two ways. He gave me this list of here’s what we did do. We don’t get a lot of credit for it. But here’s what we did do is this list of items that I mentioned. But secondly, he said there was not the pressure on us to do more for the West that one would have expected given our Western roots. It is Western guys seem to assume that because we were there, we would do it. And he argued there was more pressure from I think he had six or eight members from Quebec. There was more pressure from them to do something for Quebec than there was from that big block of Western members who just kind of assumed it should be done. So one of the lessons. Yeah, well, it’s necessary if you want something done often to put forward a fairly detailed plan and to keep up the agitation. You can’t just assume that things are going to go your way because it isn’t obvious that people will even know what that means in detail. Yes. And particularly if you don’t have the numbers, because ultimately a large block of members from Ontario particularly, it is not that the parliament was dominated by Western representatives at that time. So those were some of the accomplishments. But now the future is can conservatism revitalize itself and offer a principled alternative to the current government and there’ll be an election fairly soon. Well, so let’s talk about the current state of affairs. So what have you, do you know Justin Trudeau? No, not personally. And that’s a thing you have to be careful about making judgments just from what you in the media. Again, I keep going back to my father’s teaching. I came home one time vehemently denouncing a couple of politicians in Alberta. And he says, how do you know they’re that? Well, I said, you know, I’ve seen what they’ve been saying. I’ve read the stuff in the media. They’re a bunch of scoundrels. Well, he said, oh, let’s do a little experiment here. Oh, let’s get a list of five politicians that you have an opinion on and write down your opinion on them, negative ones that you have negative opinions on. And I’ll arrange one way or another for you to meet them or at least be at a small meeting where they are, where you can maybe get a firsthand assessment as distinct from getting it from the media, whatever. And so we did that. And then he said, then I want you to come back and tell me if your impression is the same as it was before. And we did. And I came back with four out of the five. I actually had a more positive impression after actually meeting them and seeing them than I did by just absorbing what I absorbed through the media. And that which told me you got to be careful about making these judgments. Yeah, well, it’s very difficult to know when you’re informed by media sources, just how partial your information is because you don’t have anything to counter it. Yeah. Yeah. And the best and none of us can actually go and say, I want a personal meeting with the prime minister. But there are ways of getting closer to people that are close to him. I’ve watched them have done things. There are ways to get closer than just to rely on media or partisan material. But with respect to Justin Trudeau, I don’t feel he’s a prime minister in the real sense. One of the things I worry about is virtual politics, politics being conducted in virtual space as distinct from real political democratic space. And I get a feeling that Justin Trudeau is a former drama teacher playing the role of prime minister as distinct from being a prime minister. I think we don’t have a finance minister. I think we have a virtual prime minister, a finance minister. We have a well-meaning journalist, perhaps, but playing the role of finance minister. Nothing in her background would suggest a grasp of public finance or the economy or anything else. And I worry about us getting into a virtual politics that is not the real thing, but that the country doesn’t have a real prime minister, doesn’t have a real finance minister. And one of the analogies that’s come home to me on this, Sandra and I watched some of these medical shows on TV, The Good Doctor, The Resident, Chicago Med. There’s a bunch of them. And those actors are very, very good at playing the role of doctors and nurses. They’re charismatic. They talk. They show them in the operating room doing something with somebody’s liver and putting it in a tray like you would think these are real doctors, but they are. They’re actors playing the role very, very well. But if you were ill and you’ve been through this, would you want one of them to actually operate on you? Or would you want the real thing? Even if the real thing, maybe she’s not, that doctor’s not charismatic or he’s got a wart on his nose or something wrong, but he knows how to do the real thing. And I think the country’s in danger of being governed in this virtual space as distinct from the actual space. So I don’t think of Justin Trudeau as a real prime minister. The second thing is, I worry that he is guided by ideologies that have little or nothing to do with Canada. This embracing of critical race theory is not a Canadian rooted theory or philosophy. Well, he has stated publicly, as far as I understand, that Canada doesn’t really have a culture. Well, yeah, that may be. But he’s importing these theories basically from the United States, the critical race theory, identity politics, wokeism, and cancel culture. And particularly Western Canada does not see that as even Canadian, don’t see it as Canadians. Our prime minister guided by some philosophy basically, the fact that the reaction to Black Lives Matter, which understandably the kind of issue it is in the United States, but to just import that here, if you want to get off on racial discrimination, surely the emphasis here should have been on the Indian Act and the Indigenous and Aboriginal populations. So the fact that we have a virtual prime minister, not a real prime minister, and one guided by ideologies that in my view are not Canadian is reason enough for his replacement. And I think the worry, I think there’s backroom people in the Liberal Party that will concede never in the public arena that Justin Trudeau is not the sharpest knife in the political kitchen and that Mark Carney has a far better grasp of all this stuff. He’s not reading off a script when he does it. But if you’re headed for liberal leadership under Mark Carney, then all these things, particularly this ideologically orientation is liable to get deeper and worse rather than better. A lot of Western Canadians can’t understand why Trudeau just falls all over himself to be recognized in Washington and Beijing, the Davos crowd, and makes no effort to bolster his fortunes in Winnipeg or Regina or Edmonton or Calgary. We know they’re not as traumatic places as Washington and Beijing, but this is your own country and you’re the prime minister of that part of the country. So what do you think it is on the Conservative side that’s not putting up a sufficient, let’s say, offense or defense against this? Or do you think the tide will turn in the next election? It doesn’t look like a conclusion to me. That comes back to what we’ve talked about before. I think conservatism needs to be rejuvenated by some of these things we’ve talked about it by realignment, by adopting a realistic position on the environment, by offering an alternative on the poverty question, on dealing with balance. I think the conservatives could champion balance as a very major part of their position. What’s the balance between health protection and civil rights protection? What’s the balance between economy and the environment? Balance used to be a fundamental political characteristic. Canadians, there’s that joke about why the Canadian crossed the road to get to the middle. And not just a middle that’s a meaningless compromise, but a substantive middle that you can stand on. I think if the conservatives can do that sort of thing, they could offer a principled alternative to the liberals. But at present, that’s not developing. Hopefully it might from my standpoint under Ernautou, but it’s not developing yet. And what the conservative federal party has to watch is it has to address this Western alienation. It’s got a huge base in Western Canada, but it’s got to. Do you see any signs of that happening? And it looks to me like the conservatives over recent years have struggled, certainly on the charisma end of the leadership spectrum. And that seems to be at least in part why Trudeau was able to make the inroads that he made. I mean, maybe people believed it was time for a change as well because. Yeah, nine years is often the lifespan. Well, I think the jury’s still out on Ernautou. There’s still opportunity, but time is getting short. And as I say, I think there’s a need for revitalizing conservatives at the federal level. And I try and list all in that book, I try and list some of those things that can be done. I don’t know whether the country has to get into real, even deeper trouble than it is now. I mean, it’s in trouble. It’s in trouble on the economy. It’s in trouble on the international stage. It’s not respected whether things have to get worse before they can get better. But my father dealt with four federal administration, Mackenzie King during the latter part of the Depression, the war, Louis Salamera, John Dieffenbaker and Lester Pearson. And he said the strongest federal cabinet he dealt with, and he didn’t agree with everything they did by any stretch of imagination, was Mackenzie King’s war cabinet. When the country got into a war or the prospect of a war, leaders could go to somebody, King could go to Salamera, who was a high powered constitutional lawyer in Quebec with no idea of getting into federal policy. You have to count the countries. Sidi Howe was a business guy who normally would not have stayed in politics the length of time that he did. But Howe could go to business people and say, you are coming to Ottawa to help organize wartime production. And when they asked, what are you going to pay me? He said, I’ll pay you a dollar a year. And they came and they came. And I sometimes wonder if things have to get to that point where you can go to some of these people that could make a much greater contribution than what we’ve got there now and say, your country is, I don’t care what you’re doing academically or business wise, you’ve got to come, you’ve got to run for public office and offer an alternative. But it’s a shame that you have to get to that. So what do you think are the fundamental issues that face Canadians at the moment? You said the country is in trouble in some ways. Well, I think one is this national unity problem. I don’t think particularly Central Canada understands the depth of this Western alienation. Again, yeah. And if you ever had a dual separatist movement, Quebec moving in that direction and the West moving at the same time, you tear the country apart. I don’t think there’s an appreciation by the Laurentian elites that that old model of Canada is not sufficient for the 21st century. So that and Canadians can never take national unity for granted. Our country is too big and too diverse to just hope it’s going to hang together. So that’s one issue. The second is the fiscal issue. These astronomical deficits and debts and no even recognition that this could be a problem. When we were crusading against unbalanced budget in the 1990s, the liberals didn’t oppose the ultimate objective. So yeah, eventually got a balanced budget, but you guys are going too fast or you’re doing it the wrong way or you’re cutting it, but they didn’t oppose the ultimate objective. But today, it’s not even stated as an objective. They bought into this new monetary theory that you can overspend and print money. And as long as it doesn’t seem to register in terms of the immediate inflation, you can do it ad infinitum. And so I think restoring the fiscal health of the country is going to be an enormous challenge. And I don’t know, whoever does that is going to face a terrible task because it can’t be done as quickly as it should be or could be without causing enormous pain. And then our relations with the rest of the world, I think they’ve deteriorated under this almost pathetic desire to be recognized by the world elites and the Davos crowd, the Washington crowd. And in Beijing, I think is a dangerous thing. I think on the international stage, the big 21st century competition is between the state-directed democracy as promoted by the Communist Party and government of China and citizen-directed democracy as traditionally practiced in the West, but which is in a lot of trouble, and state-directed capitalism as, and they call it that, they call it capitalism, state-directed capitalism versus market-driven capitalism, Western version. I think the West needs strong ideological leadership on those two fronts, and we’re certainly not getting that from hardly any Western leader, let alone Justin Trudeau. I don’t know, I got off on the China thing, but I went to China several times. I went to China once as the leader of the opposition. I got to know some of these people in the international liaison department of the Communist Party, which is the party’s foreign affairs department that establishes relationships with political parties all over the world. And these are the guys that meet you at the airport, and they have the standard questions. Is there somebody else? It’s all been planned out, but is there somebody else you’d like to see or some other place you want to go? And so I knew one of these fellows well enough to pull his leg. So I said, yes, I would like to meet my equivalent. I would like to meet the leader of the official opposition in China. So he goes away and huddles with his officials and comes back and says, we think if there is such a guy, he’s in jail, or it should be. But then he got serious. He said, the closest thing to you is that Martin Lee in Hong Kong, who is the leader of the Democratic faction in Hong Kong. But on all my trips there, everyone from the person driving the bus to the Politburo member hammered away on those two things. Our state-directed democracy is superior to your fuzzy, whatever that kind of democracy is that you have. And our state-directed capitalism, which has produced growth rates of 12%, 8%, 10%, is superior to your market-driven capitalism. And we will beat you on both those fronts. And they are making yards on that internationally. And so I think there’s leadership needed in the Western world, hopefully can, that could provide some of it to counter that, which means strengthening our version of democracy and strengthening our practice of market-based capitalism. Do you think the CCP and its machinations, so to speak, does pose an economic threat to Canada? Or do you think that the deficiencies of their system will eventually manifest themselves once they… I mean, it’s easy to have growth rates of 10% when you’re starting from zero, essentially. And so… Well, I personally believe that there are fundamental weaknesses in that state-directed everything. On that subject, like the last time I went to China, I went after I was out of the parliament. I knew some of these people in the international liaison department. I said, because I was on this theme of training our politicians, I said, I want to visit three of your main training facilities for communist party officials. I didn’t know if they agree or not, but sure, they said, sure. So I went and visited three of these complexes for training communist party officials. And they are impressive. Now, of course, you got to attend. You don’t have an option of not attending. But they offered five major courses. One of the major ones was military, still today, 20% military. To rise to the top, you have to serve in several different districts. You can’t just spend your entire political life in one district. If you want to get to the national level, you had to serve in different districts. You had to serve at different levels, municipal or state provincial, before you could get to the national. You had to come back every five years for a six-month refresher course at these training facilities, which are like university campuses with buildings and training facilities, think tanks. And very frighteningly impressive when you compared it with our haphazard way of preparing people for public life. And at one of these think tanks, one of these campuses, there was a meeting with a scholar from one of their think tanks. And I asked him this convoluted question. I wasn’t sure it was even getting through because it was done through translation, although a lot of those people speak English too, but they use the translation to give them time to think. So I said, in the days of the Roman Empire, they like history, they’ll talk history. I said, suppose the leaders of the Roman Empire, the Caesar’s, had got together and had a strategic meeting to figure out, is there any threat to our regime? Is there anybody that could ever replace us? As inconceivable as that is. And somebody might say, well, you’ve got to watch those Persians in the East. There could be a revival of the Persian Empire. You’ve got to watch those. And someone else might say, well, we’ve got to watch those Northern barbarians. They’re getting pretty aggressive and they could march down the roads that we built right into Rome. And somebody else might say, we may have an internal problem. We’ve got all these slaves and disenfranchised people, but nobody would have ever guessed that there was an obscure little sect in the backwater of the Roman Empire and Judea, that there was a guy in a carpenter shop and a group of 12 people, that his idea and his followers would someday Constantine, a Christian guy would sit on the throne of Rome and turn it into the Holy Roman Empire. You would never have thought of that. So I get this 10 minute, that’s why I asked this scholar, could it possibly be that it’s somewhere in some backwater in China that nobody’s thinking about or painting it? There’s some idea or some group that could actually replace the Communist Party. So he doesn’t answer right away because there’s a Communist Party official in be a little bit careful of it. And what he did say though, surprised me, he says the environmental movement, that hastily said, but we understand that. He said, these young people are very much concerned about this. And but we understand that we’re going to deal with that. We’re going to hit it off in the past. Right. Well, that goes along with people like Bjorn Lomborg’s supposition that once people hit a certain standard of living, they start to become radically concerned with broader environmental issues. They’re no longer desperate to feed themselves and they can look at the quality, the broader quality of their environment. Yeah, but I was very surprised at that. And again, it shows that we’re competing. Maybe that’s another front you’re going to end up competing with them on. They’re going to try to demonstrate that citizen directed democracy and citizen directed capitalism can respond more quickly and better to the environmental challenge than your system. So all of this suggests the need to pull up the socks. So I kind of end up, I’m supposed to be retired and writing and doing some consulting on this, but I end up, my deepest beliefs is that Canada could be, there is a better Canada than what we got now. That Canada can be, and that requires recognizing the distinctiveness and the current concerns and aspirations of Western Canada as a part of Canada, that Canada can be better governed as a democracy. And there’s things that can be done to strengthen their democracy, that conservatives can make a bigger and better contribution to that Canada, the future and that better democracy and that people of faith can make a bigger and better contribution if they conduct themselves wisely and graciously. That would probably be my summary statement of beliefs. Well, I think that’s a really good place to stop. Yes. Okay. Well, I very much enjoyed this, Jordan. I hope it’s of some interest and use to your audience. Yeah. Well, it’s been a pleasure talking to you again. And I’d very much like to thank you for taking the time to do this. I have one final question. I guess, do you know if, I know Pierre Paulover is using YouTube and some of the new communication techniques to his great advantage. Is there any recognition among the conservatives, let’s say that while YouTube, which is the biggest television network that’s ever existed by a huge margin and has almost no costs for utilization, let’s say, is there any understanding that there is the possibility of communicating directly with constituents and even bypassing the media in some sense? Oh, I think there is. I’m not that close to the sort of the federal party’s communications effort, but Pierre, it would be very much, he’s a very articulate and with a member of parliament. He was a high school student when he was on my constituency board in Calgary, southwest. He’s had, again, he’s had a long interest. If you were a scout, if you were a scout in the arenas, you would have seen Pierre as this is a fellow that’s got something to contribute. And I’ll be talking with him soon on this show. Oh, yes. Well, he would be very good. But my one worry with the people that one reaches, and I’m not in any way trying to insult your audience, but with a lot of the younger people, I worry sometimes about substituting discussion, blogging, tweeting, commentating for actually doing something. That’s why I entitled that book of mine, Doing Something. I’ve seen some of these younger political people that get into a, again, it’s this virtual politics, they get into a virtual loop. They talk about the issue, they blog about it, they tweet about it. But when I ask them, did you do anything? Like, did you go and write to your member of parliament? Did you call anybody? Did you attend something? Did you consider running for office? I tend to get a blank. And I think the more this, what enormous work can be done in that virtual arena, but the more it can be pushed into, okay, we’ve discussed this, we’ve talked about it, what are we going to do about it? I used to tend to end my meetings, sometimes quite antagonistically almost within office. I didn’t come here to this meeting in wherever, I didn’t come here just to entertain you or to tell you stories. I came here because we want to elect somebody to change this. And if you’re just here to listen to me or to have jokes or have coffee afterwards, this is not the place for you. Are you prepared? I used to push people hard on that, because it’s a little bit easy in our system to substitute the discussion for action. Right. So how do you tie the discussion? And even discussion with the public to concrete maneuvers within the existing political system that will make change. Yeah, by giving them a little list of some things they can do. Like if I was at a meeting where they’re discussing this balance between health protection measures on COVID and the protection of your rights and responsibilities under the constitution, you know, if you’re concerned about your limitations on your rights and freedoms, have you written to the attorney general? Have you called the justice minister’s office? Have you talked to your MP to register that concern? Have you done something? And often just a little thing starts to trigger something. Have you gone to a meeting of other people that are doing this? Here’s three think tanks that are doing some work in this area. They desperately need money and more context. Can you contact any one of them? Just getting some little action like that usually leads to something else if the person’s action oriented. So are those things detailed out in your book? Because I think people don’t know these action steps. Yeah, fair enough. On both the democratic front, which is relevant, you don’t have to be a concert. I say to everybody, we’re all small d Democrats and we’re all Canadians here in our political arena. So that we have in common. So these measures to strengthen democracy are in everybody’s advantage. And then I’ve got another section that deals with just strengthening conservatism, if that’s your orientation. Yeah, do something. Do something. Well, thank you very much again. Thank you, Johnny. It was a pleasure seeing you. Let’s keep in touch. Yes, definitely. Okay, bye bye.