Conservative Leadership Canada | Dr. Leslyn Lewis | EP 283

In politics, now I'm finding that it is just fear. Let's create enough fear and then we can then have this really intrusive policy. It doesn't matter what the outcome is, whether or not that policy will have the outcome of improving the environment. That just goes out the window, and that's what's really frustrating to me as someone who has an education in environmental studies. We are not seeing that the policies have a positive outcome on the environment.

The idea that we have to accept arbitrary limits to economic growth, which are mostly going to hurt poor people, and higher energy prices and higher food prices, which are mostly going to hurt poor people, and that that's going to help on the environmental sustainability front? That's just, it's not only nonsense and a lie, it's an anti-truth. You couldn't say anything farther from the truth than that.

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Hello everyone, I'm pleased today to be talking to Dr. Leslie Lewis. Dr. Lewis is a candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party in Canada at the federal level. Although this is a podcast with an international audience, the leadership race in Canada on the Conservative front turns out to be something of surprising international significance. Not least, I think, because our Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who I'm not a fan of for those of you who don't know, is a real poster boy for the globalist utopians who are busily attempting to make this planet far worse.

And so the best challenge to Trudeau on the political front in Canada will definitely come from the Conservative Party, who have been the historical alternatives to Canada's Liberals. Dr. Lewis is a signally important participant in that Conservative leadership process. She's more, I think it's fair to say, on the socially conservative front but a very interesting person, and so she's agreed to talk to me today which I also think is a good thing.

I've talked to Pierre Pauliev, who's the front-runner in the race, and Roman Baber—so, that'll be three candidates including Dr. Lewis. That'll be three of the five candidates. I reached out to Jean Charest, who used to be Premier of Quebec, but his team felt that speaking to a "ripper bait" such as myself was probably not in his interest. There's another candidate, HSN, who I haven't yet talked with and perhaps still might if time makes that possible.

But we'll start with the bio. Leslie Lewis graduated with a bachelor's degree from the University of Toronto Trinity College, graduating magna cum laude. She has a master's degree in environmental studies from York University with a concentration in business and environment from the Schulich School of Business and a Juris Doctor from Osgoode Hall Law School and a PhD in law from Osgoode Hall Law School. She and her family are residents of the town of Dunnville, where she serves her community as Member of Parliament for Haldeman-Norfolk.

Leslie exploded onto the national political scene when she ran previously for the leadership of the Conservative Party in 2020. Despite having no pre-established political network and coming from relative obscurity, her vision of a strong, united, and prosperous nation resonated with Canadians right across the country. She finished in third place in the race, winning the popular vote ahead of eventual winner Aaron O'Toole and party co-founder Peter MacKay. Dr. Lewis is currently running for the second time in the current battle for the Canadian Conservative federal leadership.

So welcome Dr. Lewis. Thank you very much for making time. It's quite exciting to have the opportunity to engage in these long-form discussions on the political front. I think that's something perhaps revolutionary in Canadian politics, to be able to circumvent the legacy media, let's say. So, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, it's a great pleasure to be here and I'm very honored to be here with you today.

Yeah, so people, we might as well start right from the beginning. Let's do a little bit of a biographical discussion to begin with. Tell me a bit about your family, tell me about your background, and then also you're very well educated and then you made a foray into politics. Let's walk through that a little bit so that we can place you in everyone's imagination before we move to the policy side of things.

Well, as you said, I reside in a small community called Dunnville. It's in the riding of Haldeman-Norfolk, which is in the Niagara area south of Hamilton, for those of you who are familiar with Southern Ontario. As you said, I've recently just emerged into politics and I felt a calling on my life to really serve, use my skills that I have honed over the last few decades in education, in law, and just practical business experience, to better my country.

Because right now, I see that our country is at a precipice and I'm concerned about the future of our country. I'm concerned about my children and the future that they will have and the dreams that I've had in this country and that I've been able to realize. I'm very concerned that they won't be there for future generations when we look at the 1.3 trillion dollars that we have in debt and the fact that every day just to service that debt we're paying over 140 million dollars a day just in interest payments, just to service that debt.

And the fact that my children will owe $45,000 is their share of the national debt. There are so many things that are happening in this world that are having influences on whether or not we will survive as a sovereign nation. And so I think that my experience, lending my experience to this cause is one of the most noble things that I feel that I've done in my life.

So when you were in university, you spent a lot of time in university. Let's walk through your education.

Well, maybe that didn't used to be a problem, although it's become one. Let's walk through your university career and then tell me about your developing interest in politics.

So, your first degree was at the University of Toronto?

Yes, it's actually in Sociology, African Studies with a minor in Women's Studies and Philosophy. So as you can see, I have well versed in the social sciences and I understand the language of many things that are transpiring now.

I went through the education system and throughout my education I often felt that I was in an environment they were trying to mold me, but in the earlier years at the University of Toronto, I had the ability to at least I knew where the limits were. But I also had the ability to challenge, whereas I found in my later stages that things there was more conformity in education and there was less diversity of thought which was very, very concerning to me.

And even in my later days of teaching, I almost felt like an undercover agent because I couldn't really necessarily reveal that I was conservative, although it came out later on because I was asked to help out the party in 2015 at the end of my PhD and to run in an election in a riding that there was a scandal in. And so I had to step in last minute. So in the end, it was revealed. But I don't think that many people were really cognizant of how much of a conservative I was because that's not something that's really celebrated in university.

And that sounds like really ironic that one would say that in an institution of higher learning that you would not be able to celebrate diversity of thought, but that's what the end of my university career was like, and that's really unfortunate.

What years were you studying Sociology and Women's Studies at the University of Toronto?

Oh, in the '90s, in the early '90s. I completed my first degree.

Okay, so that's very—both Sociology and Women's Studies are very left-leaning, certainly now, but they were back in the early 1990s too. There was kind of a little initial peak of political correctness in the universities in the early 1990s.

So two questions there. Why did you decide to go into Sociology and Women's Studies, and were you conservative in your orientation then? And if so, how did you bridge that gap?

Well, actually, my family came here as immigrants, and the Liberal Party was the party that they felt most at home in. And so although I grew up in an ultra, ultra-conservative family—religious-wise, economically, fiscally conservatives, just a traditional immigrant family that comes to Canada and has the foundations of strong family values, believing in strong faith values and that strong faith in your community and contributing to that community.

So I would consider myself as growing up in a conservative family, although it was a politically liberal family. And when I went to school I didn't even think about politics at all, I just wanted to get an education. And I was concerned about some of the social dilemmas because I was very active in my church doing prison ministry, working with at-risk youth, and so I was very concerned about the social dilemmas.

And so Sociology was a natural fit. Sociology really was about understanding the theoretical underpinnings of what society really was comprised of. So it was a lot of theory. And so I didn't really find that it was left-leaning. Women's Studies, of course, that was my minor, and that was more so left-leaning, but it was still very theoretical back then.

Now what I'm finding is a lot of the theories have become dogma and have seeped into the mainstream narrative and have become the norm rather than just a theory. And so that's the difference between what I went to school in the '90s and what is studied now.

And you could have alternative positions back then, whereas now I find that you're demonized for having critical thought abilities.

Okay, so the advantage of that would have been to have gone through that four-year initial period would have been that you became conversant—very conversant—say, with the progressive views. The downside would have been, well, the tension that you would have experienced, I presume, between your beliefs and the beliefs that were being promoted.

Why weren't you convinced by the more progressive doctrines of the sociologists and the women's studies teachers? And what did that do to your—what did experiencing that tension for four years do to the way that you conceptualized your philosophy and your practical approach?

Well, it does shape you. Even though you have that conservative foundation, that education does impact on you because there are things that I had bought into that I'm just now recognizing that may not have been all-encompassing or may not have been ideally where I would have been had I not had that education.

So there was a notion that I had to just—I had to just—my success was really based on what I could materially get from society or my educational pursuits. And there was a lot of friction there with also raising a family and having a successful marriage, etc.

So many of that I think may have even undermined some of the traditional values that I had, and I don't know whether that's a good or a bad thing because I was able to reconcile it. And even in university, I joined the Reform Party because I saw that Preston Manning's values were very much in line with what I believed.

And there were questions that I had through my education that weren't being adequately answered, and so I just naturally gravitated towards my upbringing, and I found that he as a leader was somebody who I believed was a very dignified and upstanding person. And I saw the values that he had for and the desires that he had for this country, and so I aligned myself with that party very early on.

So do you think, for having been educated on the progressive front, do you think that you developed a deeper appreciation for the perspective that's being put forward there?

I mean, the progressive argument is something like people who have authority and status often benefit from unfair privilege and opportunity and capitalize on power, let's say, at the expense of people who are less fortunate as situated in the hierarchical structure of society. You know, there's some truth to that, obviously, because power corrupts every human institution and we have to keep an eye out on it.

Why do you think you were unconvinced by the more radical stream of the progressive doctrine, especially given that you were immersed in it for four years and subjected to a fair bit, I imagine, both of conceptual and peer pressure?

Well, as I said, it—from a theoretical perspective, a lot of it does make sense. The problem that I'm having now is that it's almost being inversed. So we know that privilege is relative. I oftentimes, I've walked into a room and people would say to me, "Oh, you're a lawyer," how they would know that? Perhaps by the way I speak, by the way I carry myself.

So there is relative privilege in different aspects of your social ranking, and that's something that we've always had in society. The reason why I speak about an inversion is because what I'm seeing is that they will often make your identity your master status. And so that's what I push back on right now because we were able to critically analyze why that is not good for society.

But I even find myself right now, even in the Conservative race, as someone who has only the only track record of someone running a Conservative leadership race and winning the popular vote as an outsider, I still will not get media coverage and attention primarily because I don't fit their narrative.

And their narrative is that the Conservative Party is a white, racist party. And so to have me potentially highlight me would go against the media and the social narrative, so much to the point that in 2020 Kamala Harris was featured over 800 times more than I was, even though she was not running in our country and even though her position was an appointment and I was running to earn my position as a leadership candidate as the leader of the Conservative Party.

So those things, it shows you largely how the left has reversed even what their beliefs are to the point that when you don't fit their narrative, they come after you and they attack you very, very viciously.

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So it's very perverse, say, because you're objecting on philosophical grounds to the idea that you should be categorized by, let's say, your race and your sex. And yet the left insists that that's the cardinal distinction between people and then insists that people like that should be brought to the forefront because they've been marginalized and then insists that that should only be the case.

Clarence Thomas is a good case in point too, who's been pilloried like mad for not fitting the mold. So despite the fact that you have the, let's say, self-evident characteristics that the left is trumpeting, the fact that you aren't conducting yourself in a manner that seems to be ideologically appropriate means that in some real sense that you're persona non grata.

And that really is interest—that's the inversion that you're speaking about. That really is a fascinating phenomenon as far as I'm concerned.

So, all right, so after you were at the University of Toronto, your next degree was what?

A Masters of Environmental Studies.

Okay, so that's a bit of a detour. Now you've jumped from one leftist hotbed into an even more leftist hotbed, I would say, because not only are you taking Environmental Studies, you're taking Environmental Studies at York, which is definitely one of Canada’s—I mean, that place is paralyzed by strikes about every two years. So, I would say it's fair to say that must be one of Canada's most leftist higher educational institutions.

And so now you've jumped into Environmental Studies. Why Environmental Studies and why York, and what was that like?

To be honest with you, I don't even know why I decided to choose Environmental Studies other than the fact that I had a deep concern about the environment, about our stewardship. And it wasn't something that I thought that I was going to make a lot of money from or that it was on a desired path. It was almost like a honing signal, like something that sent out to you and drawing you to that, but you can't really put your finger on why it is that you did that degree.

And that's the best way I can explain it. I'm very happy that I did do that, and even that program was very, very different than what this Environmental Studies is now. Even then, I feel that I had a well-rounded, all-encompassing education in the environment. It wasn't the notion of climate change and the politicization of climate change. That wasn't something that I dealt with as a master's student in the environment.

That is a recent phenomenon that we've taken climate change, we've politicized it, we've made it a scientific issue, and we've used it to as a revenue-generating tool to conjure up fear. And that wasn't something that I found in my studies.

So what did you—okay, so let's go into that a little bit. So what did you learn in your couple of years—two-year master's program, was it? What did you learn about the environment, and tell me how that shaped your thinking now?

I'm a big fan—people know this—I'm a big fan of Bjorn Lomborg. He's done a pretty comprehensive analysis of sustainability and environmental issues, and also a man named Marian Tupy has written a great book recently called "Super Abundance." They're both trying very hard to sort out the priorities of the various environmental concerns that do in fact beset us. What did you learn at York, and what do you think is of stellar importance on the environmental front confronting us now?

Well, you'd be surprised what I learned. Well, starting from the theoretical perspective of, say, sustainability, "Our Common Future," that notorious book—we started from that foundation. But we also learned the role of big pharma and that that could be all-consuming.

We also learned about some of the improprieties that were committed by big pharma in Southern—in Southern nations, whether it's South America or African countries. We also learned about sustainability and the role of farmers and generational ability to sustain the land, intergenerational ability.

We learned about the atmosphere in a very, very different way than how we're talking about it right now. We knew that nitrogen made up 78% of the atmosphere, that oxygen made up 21%, and that carbon was 0.04%.

So we talked about carbon reduction in a very, very different way than we have done now, which is more of a politicized way, and it's completely different. I'm not sure what is being taught now in an Environmental Studies program, but it was fascinating because we looked at things like the role of Monsanto and the appropriation of biodiversity and how that will lead to fewer choices for people in the farming sector.

So it was something that I was preempted towards, that I was pre-warned, that these things were coming. And we've looked at even African communities and the role of some of the United Nations food programs, how they have these actually destabilized those communities.

If you look at, say, REDD—Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation—and that program basically encouraged people in certain African communities not to cut down trees because they said it was contributing to a very bad carbon footprint; it was contributing to depletion and carbonization of the environment, etc.

And so they encouraged those individuals not to cut down these trees, and the people were hungry. They began to starve; you saw malnutrition in communities that never had malnutrition before. And so they had to go back and say, "Well, we are encouraging them not to cut down these trees, but they're starving."

In other projects, they encouraged people not to—they were using corn for ethanol, and the people were going hungry. So we were looking at all of these programs, and you have to ask whether or not it's serving humanity.

And even if we look at our situation in Canada, and we look at even our resource sector—in my master's program we were taught that resource development is not mutually exclusive from environmental sustainability; that's what we were taught.

And so we looked for ways to solve problems, whether that's through efficient technology, innovative technology, working with corporations to make sure that their impact or their footprint is minimal and that they can remedy some of the damage that's caused to the environment.

So we looked for solutions whereas in politics now, I'm finding that it is just fear. Let's create enough fear and then we can have this really intrusive policy, and it doesn't matter what the outcome is, whether or not that policy will have the outcome of improving the environment—that just goes out the window.

And that's what's really frustrating to me as someone who has an education in Environmental Studies, that we are not seeing that the policies have a positive outcome on the environment; it's just largely revenue-generating.

Yeah, well you brought up a bunch of issues there. I mean, one issue I would say is the idea that somehow we have to make life difficult for impoverished people so that the environment will improve. You talked about the injunction to cease deforestation and the consequent generation of hunger.

The first thing that I think conservatives and intelligent liberals could agree upon and insist upon is that there's no pathway to environmental sustainability that involves making already poor people more miserable. First of all, because we shouldn't be making them more miserable, that's for sure. And second, because people can't care about broader environmental concerns when they're so desperate they're worried about tonight's shelter and the next meal.

And so the idea that we have to accept arbitrary limits to growth, economic growth, which are mostly going to hurt poor people, and higher energy prices and higher food prices, which are mostly going to hurt poor people, and that that's going to help on the environmental sustainability front? That's just—it’s not only nonsense and a lie, it's an anti-truth. You couldn’t say anything farther from the truth than that.

I completely agree with you, Dr. Peterson, in that it's actually—I'll tell you a story that happened to me. During my master's, actually it was during my PhD, I was unable to publish a paper because I referenced the term "environmental imperialism," and the peer-reviewed reviewers told me I had to take that word out in order to publish my paper.

So I said, "Absolutely not, I won't do it." So I had to keep shopping it around to different places, and I finally got it published. And that's really what you're talking about is environmental imperialism. Because what the West is doing now is saying, "We've developed, and yes our path of development wasn't good for the environment and we've learned."

And so now we want you to learn, and therefore we don't want you to have all the luxuries that we have because we've destroyed the environment. You stay in your state, or worse, and we will find a way to protect the environment, not recognizing that you may want to have electricity and have some of the luxuries that we have.

And instead of finding a way that we could, for lack of a better word, bring other societies along to the path of development in an environmentally sustainable way, you have this notion of environmental imperialism where you say, "No, you can't cut down that tree for food because we want to protect the forest."

It's an elitism that is coming into environmental protection, and it comes from—and I'm going to use the word privilege—that it is a stance of privilege. I think that's a proper way to use it. That we in this society—we have the privilege of having all these luxuries, and then we have the audacity to tell people that they should not strive for the same things in their lives, not just to tell them, to force them under power of law to do so.

I mean, we look at what happened to Sri Lanka as a case in point. And you know, my sense—I spent about two years studying issues of environmental sustainability and economic development, and that's when I realized, which was a great delight and shock to me, that the fastest way forward to true environmental sustainability was to eradicate poverty.

I thought, well, that's a good deal! We can eradicate poverty and that'll be good for the planet. And then I also thought—and tell me what you think of this—the pathway forward to the amelioration of poverty and environmental sustainability is, let's say, to make the absolutely poor richer. Because then they'll start to care about the environment.

And so once you get them up to about five thousand dollars a year in GDP, people start to be concerned about longer-term issues because they can afford to. And then there's a pathway of development there that's quite clear as far as I can tell that involves cheap energy because energy is work, and energy is food.

And so the pathway is something like, well, people burn dung or wood—it’s better to replace that with coal, and then it's better to replace the coal with oil and the oil with natural gas and the natural gas conceivably with nuclear and some judicious mix of renewables. And each of those steps is somewhat more expensive using current technology.

So generally speaking, countries have to pass through that entire developmental sequence. And I know that the developing world is planning to generate something like 170 coal-fired plants in the next few years and then I don't know how many nuclear plants China is planning to build, but a lot.

And so instead of interfering with that and making fossil fuel unconscionably expensive and then driving countries like China to shop for bad sources of coal instead of relatively clean burning coal, we're moralizing like mad in our privilege in the West, and we're dooming all these people to not only privation and want in a very fundamental sense, but to an environmentally degraded future.

So the bloody leftists on the environmental front are not only getting—are not only putting forward a vision that's contrary to a conservative vision or a true liberal vision, but they're putting forward a vision that isn't going to result in what they purport to desire.

No, absolutely! And it goes even beyond, say, electrifying the South. It goes into sustaining their food source, right? And right now, there is a major attack on even their food source.

If you take the situation in Sri Lanka, the situation in Sri Lanka is not much different than what we will be facing here. Ironically, it started off with lockdowns. The lockdowns really crippled the average person who made their living selling on the streets through tourism, vending, and the impact was still there when they imposed even more restrictions on the nitrogen content in the fertilizer.

So you had people who were used to making their money by selling tea—tea farming—and with the 30% nitrogen content reduction, their yields were much less and so they couldn't sustain themselves economically. And then you even had the rice farmers in Sri Lanka also, which is a large staple cash crop there, and they also had to deal with the nitrogen content reduction.

And so they were making the type of money. So you don't have the money flowing through the system that you ordinarily would, and then you have from the lockdown, the supply chains were so limited that the cost of everything increased and the people have fewer dollars to even purchase these items now.

And so that's why you saw them raid the presidential palace because a light goes off: "Why should these politicians be living in a palace in luxury while I cannot even put one meal a day on the table for my family?" And that's why they said, "Enough is enough."

Okay, so let's put that in context now. We talk about the nitrogen issue. So first thing is that we've seen now a tremendous amount of unhappiness on the Dutch farmer front. So, the judicial authorities in Holland accused the Netherlands government of failing to live up to its international obligations on the pollution amelioration front and required immediate action to be taken with regard to nitrogen pollution, which admittedly can be a problem.

Now the plan that the Netherlands imposed by compulsion will result in the destruction of a substantial proportion of the Netherlands farming infrastructure. And the people who are promoting this say, "Well, we think the sector can be resilient enough to manage this," but the farmers know perfectly well that many of them are going to be forced out of business, as the politicians themselves have not only admitted but are aiming for.

And now there is this approximately 30% reduction in the Dutch herd and the associated farms, and the politicians who are pushing this seem to think that the whole agricultural sector in the Netherlands, which is the world's second biggest exporter of agricultural products, that the infrastructure there will be able to tolerate this forced and compelled reduction in supply and consequent increases in costs.

But my sense is the whole agricultural section will stagger and fall especially under the weight of these post-COVID supply chain problems. I mean, I can't see how you can take a whole industry that runs on about a three to five percent margin, force a 30% reduction in its inputs over an eight-year period, and expect the whole system to survive.

Now they don't expect it to survive—they don't expect it to survive.

Oh okay!

We'll get into that now. Just to add a little twist to that, now the Dutch farmers are out protesting. There's 40,000 of them with their big tractors and they don't do that lightly because those tractors are expensive and they're very busy.

And right in the bloody midst of this, our Prime Minister did exactly the same thing. He unilaterally announced a mandatory 30% reduction in nitrogen output and he—on the farmers' side—and he wasn't even willing to tie that to units of nitrogen used per unit of food produced because apparently, he doesn't give a damn whether we produce food effectively or not, and then that means that poor people will go hungry.

So what do you make of this? Again, we said this isn't even good environmental policy, it's not going to work. And I don't know what's going to happen in Sri Lanka but my suspicions are the people are going to be cutting down the forests and eating the animals because what the hell else are they going to do?

Exactly. You're absolutely correct. I don't believe that they expect the survival of the system. The policies are created largely because they don’t believe that system is worth keeping.

And they've said it to the farmers in the Netherlands. They've said that to them. In some places the nitrogen reduction content is up to 90% in terms of conservation, right? In the Netherlands, up to 90%.

And when—and remember these farmers, including our farmers, they have been approached about this net-zero before. This is not the first time. And they were told, "If you invest in innovative technologies that would bring down your carbon footprint and therefore you would get some credits for that."

And so many of those farmers in the Netherlands, they spent millions of dollars investing in innovative technology, and then after that, the government said, "What? That's not good enough."

Then they brought in the nitrogen requirements. So then they imposed the nitrogen requirements upon an already fragile industry. And then the Dutch farmers said, "Well, we will not be able, exactly like in Sri Lanka, to make the yields that it would be worth financially us continuing this industry."

And what did the government say? "Well, if your farms can't sustain themselves, they're not sustainable. We'll buy them," or a corporation will buy them from you, but it's not—we cannot continue to invest in an unsustainable business.

And when the Dutch farmers come out and say, "Well, we are one of the largest exporters of cash crops, certain cash crops," what does the government say? "Oh, no, you're not. You import a lot of the things that you need to produce that."

And so when you minus that from the equation, you're actually negligible in the world scheme of the food supply chain. So they have an answer for everything, and not only that when the Dutch farmers said, "Okay, let's look at if this is really about the environment."

And the Canadian farmers are saying the same thing. "Let's look at our contribution and the contribution that we make to carbon sequestration when we plant crops. Carbon is sequestered in the soil and so do we get in Canada?"

The questions asked: "Do we get a reduction from our carbon tax that we're paying to dry the crops? Can we reduce? Can we get a reduction on that carbon tax?" And the answer is no!

In the Netherlands, what was the—the answer? The government basically said, "Well, no, you don't get to do the calculations. We're the ones who set the calculations."

So the metrics that they don't even want to negotiate on the metrics, which tells you how dictatorial this whole process is. When you cannot even have people who have tended to the land for generations, who are probably some of the most experienced farmers in the world, where you say their input is not valid, it tells you that there is an agenda beyond just protecting the environment. Because if it were just protecting the environment, you would want all of these viable inputs and you would want to say, "Okay, this practice, if it can be done in a sustainable manner, let's do it."

No, you impose a restriction that you know will kill the industry.

Okay, so I'm going to walk through a bunch of that. So let's lay out the argument here on the progressive side and take it apart.

Okay, so the first argument is, oh no, the environmental apocalypse is coming. Okay, so now let's think about that. Is an apocalypse coming? Well, we've heard about various apocalypses for the last 40 years and many of them needed to be taken seriously.

And so we could say there's some threat, but let's walk through that a little bit more. It's like, okay, we can see bad things coming in the future. Now my question would be, well who's qualified to deal with those hypothetical emergencies?

Now here's a psychological answer; you tell me what you think about this because I've just been formulating it. So one of the things you do as a therapist when people are afraid of something is you teach them how to confront it voluntarily.

And maybe someone's afraid of other people, they're socially anxious, so they don't like going to parties. And so you might say, "Well, your assignment for this week is to go to a party," and the person says, "Well, that makes me too afraid, I don't think I can do it," and "I'll get irritable and it isn't going to work," and so you say, "Okay, well let's scale it back to find something you can do that doesn't paralyze you and make you irritable."

And so maybe you say, "You go say hello to the person who runs your corner store and introduce yourself. That's your assignment for the week." And then they go out and see if they can do that.

So you don’t want to confront people with a monster that's so big that it terrifies them into paralysis or turns them into a tyrant, let's say.

So now you're an environmentalist and you're facing the apocalypse and you say, "Oh my God, I'm so terrified of this that I'm virtually paralyzed," and then you say, "Not only that, it's such an emergency that I'm 100% justified in using compulsion on others, not bringing them along voluntarily, not developing a shared vision, not talking in detail to the Dutch or the Canadian farmers who are among the most efficient utilizers of resources per unit of food grown in the world. None of that, it's top down."

And so then I would say, "Look, if your vision of the future is so apocalyptic that you're paralyzed into paralysis or you're terrified into paralysis and you've become a tyrant, then you're not the right person for the job. Your own psychological reaction is showing that."

Instead, you should be out there talking to people, the farmers in particular, let's say, and maybe we could throw in the truckers for good measure, who actually have to deal with these things on a day-to-day basis to find a shared vision.

It's not like the bloody farmers want to spend any more money on fertilizer than they have to. And get people to come along voluntarily. And so here's the moral hazard.

All right, it's the apocalypse—that's the claim. We need net zero because that means we don't have to think about all the painful details. This is terrifying us because it's such an emergency, and therefore conveniently for us, we need all the decision-making power, and we need it now.

And so the problem here is that the apocalypse justifies the emergence of a tyrant, and that's what we're seeing play out now.

I'll add one more detail to that. You said—and what we both discussed—the idea that even by the measures that the environmentalists use, these policies appear to be counterproductive. They're going to destroy the industries, they're going to throw people into poverty, they're going to produce social chaos.

And so then you think, well, okay, if they know—if they don't know this then that's unforgivable ignorance; if they do know it then it's unforgivable malevolence. And you might say, well, what's driving that?

How about if we had to choose between destroying capitalism and saving the environment, we would choose destroying capitalism?

Well, you've packed a lot into that. And what I do want to do is just to turn back to this whole climate change narrative. So we know climate change is both man-made and it is natural. The problem is, is that our solutions, of course, they're only focused on the man-made component and they want you to believe that it's only man-made, which it's—that's not true.

But that's all we could do is affect that man-made component. The hypocrisy that we see in the policies is what I have a problem with. Every day, we're importing 555,000 barrels of oil a day into Canada—555,000—and yet we're importing them from often dictatorship regimes with poorer environmental records than ours.

So we're rewarding bad behavior and yet we're saying that we cannot develop our natural resources, but we are admittingly stating that we have not moved past the point where we can live without those natural resources.

So that's one sense of the hypocrisy that I see. Another sense is, yes, you're right—it's a deliberate attempt to kill certain industries.

For example, they have been programming us for years that eating beef is selfish and that if you continue to eat meat, you're a selfish person. They've been programming us to want to eat bugs and to not want to eat especially beef.

And so you see this predictive programming coming out. And when you juxtapose that with something that they say is one of their saviors, like electric cars, and you say okay, we're gonna do a net zero analysis of beef. And they like to do that and they will say that state that, "You, Dr. Peterson, last night—well, you have to take into consideration the entire life cycle of that cattle that you ate."

And so they start from the farm, they look at all of the feces and the dung excreted from that cattle over its lifetime, its impact on runoff into the water. If they look at how much grass that cattle has eaten and then they look at the transportation cost to get that piece of nice beef on your plate that you ate last night, and they say, "Well, when you do the net zero calculation, that piece of beef is not sustainable."

But let's take an electric car. They do not start from in a cobalt mine in Africa or even for a computer, in a lithium mine in Africa, with a poor five-year-old child that if you looked at the—just the abuse that that child had to endure, your heart would melt.

It’s just such egregious circumstances, outrageous circumstances that those children are put under, and yet these are the miners of the components that we need in order to go in that electric car.

So they don't start there! Then you look at the battery, right? And no, let's look at the fact that the battery has to be charged. What is it charged with? It's charged with carbon, but yet that's not included in the carbon footprint.

And then you look at the battery, the disposal of that battery at the end of the life cycle of that car, and you know that the de—to decompose that battery will take, I think by one calculation—I don’t quote me—I think I heard 75 years.

So when you look at the life cycle of that and you do a net-zero calculation on that, you will see that it is not as green as we are told that it is, and many of the green products are not as green.

Well, didn't the EU a month ago redefine "green" to include natural gas and nuclear? Which begs a major question, which is, well, why weren't they defined that way to begin with? And what's the grounds for the reclassification?

And well, on the nuclear front, that's been bothering me for years. It's like, while France has done a pretty good job providing a stable power grid for a number of decades now, and that's about as green as it gets, there’s the problem of disposal of nuclear waste, but that's a manageable problem.

There's always a problem with energy solutions. I just can't help but see that, and I've watched the environmentalist leftists do this internal battle of ethics because the left, at least in principle, let’s say—they have two broad concerns.

Well, three: one is amelioration of absolute poverty, another is amelioration of relative poverty—that's the inequality argument—and the other, the third, is something like environmental sustainability.

And so then you might say, well, what happens when those goals run into paradoxical juxtaposition? And so then you have to decide if you're going to save the planet or you're going to save the poor.

And the answer on the environmental front, as far as I can tell, continually has been, "Oh, to hell with the poor! We're going to save the planet."

And then the catastrophe of that is, well, if you don't save the poor along with the planet, then you doom the planet and the poor. And that seems like a really bad solution to me.

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It goes even deeper to look at the fact that the net-zero calculation now is basically an attempt to really transition us from one mode of production to a new one, and it's been very, very clearly stated.

It's been very clearly stated by Klaus Schwab in his book "The Great Reset," which is not a conspiracy. You can find it on Amazon. And that's not a pitch for him; it's also a terrible book.

I read that book. It is full of platitudes. It's full of platitudes, that book.

Yeah! And there's not a lot of substantiating the grand theories in the book, but it is a grand theory of where they see our entire society going. And one of the big champions of this grand theory is Justin Trudeau. He wants to remake our society in a post-nationalist image of what he considers to be an egalitarian flat society.

But there are still a lot of inequities. If you look at the recent conference that they had in Davos, they basically put limousines on jets in order to get them over there so that they could be driven around in luxury. But yet they want to limit the travel of average Canadians.

And so you see this dichotomy and this two-tiered society being created—one where they're going after the food supply chain to control your consumption, and the only way they can do that is through the farmers.

Then the second thing is to go after your consumption and daily purchasing, which will come through environmental social governance. And the environmental social governance program is a completely new international accounting program that requires small and medium-sized businesses to allocate the carbon footprint of every single product that they sell.

And different users will have different products. Your cap, you may use your camera once a year on vacation, and another person may use it every day to film.

So the carbon footprint—it's almost impossible to measure, but yet they're coming up with this system which can only be implemented by lawyers, accountants, consultants, so you have the lawyers, the accountants, and contractors getting wealthy while small businesses will be struggling under more red tape than they have now to be able to meet these standards of this environmental social governance.

And the ironic thing about this, Dr. Peterson, is that if these same companies are operating, say, in China or overseas, these same Canadian companies do not have to subject those citizens and that country—purchasers—to that same level of tracking the carbon footprint.

Right!

Well, this is a crucial issue here because one of the things we really have to understand is that if we don't develop our ability to generate and disseminate cheap energy in the developed countries, where we have high—not only high standards of environmental stewardship on the legal front but an ethos of environmental stewardship among the distributed business class that's already there, they're already aiming at that—all that’s going to happen is that worse providers elsewhere are going to be brought aboard, as you said.

We're buying oil from—well, let's say Canada isn't— I don't think we import oil from Russia, but obviously the Europeans import fossil fuels from Russia like mad. All we're doing is enabling the Chinese and the dictatorial Gulf states to fill in the gaps, let's say.

Absolutely! I cannot see in any possible way how that's going to be good for poor people or good for the environment in any sense whatsoever.

And I think your comments about Trudeau being a poster boy for the Klaus Schwab and the WEF types, and also your comments on ESGs, which everyone should know about—the ESG mandates that are coming in at the corporate level—if we get snookered into a digital currency, which seems to me to be highly probable, then not only are corporate expenses going to have to be accounted for in terms of their hypothetical carbon footprint, but every bloody purchase that individuals make is going to be subject to exactly the same kind of analysis and taxation and nudging and pressure.

And so every consumer decision we make is going to be weighed up in terms of our environmental impact for no good outcome.

Let's make that clear. To make everything more expensive, to make energy more expensive, to make food more inaccessible, to hurt the planet, to make it more difficult for people to conduct their business, and for poor people to starve—that's the bloody vision that's being put forth by the half-wit cliché mongers like Klaus Schwab.

Well, let me first speak about the first point that you made about bad actors. So we have the third-largest accessible oil reserves on the planet in Canada, which we leave largely untapped. And right now in Europe, 40% of their supply is coming from Russia. If we were able to develop our natural resources, even get our LNG to tidewater, get it over to Europe, we could actually offset dependency on Russian oil.

And so you're absolutely right that the need is still there. And the fact that our government has implemented industry-killing policies like Bill C-48 and Bill C-69—that is basically just to stymie our production.

It is the same thing that when we implement these policies on our farmers, it's really affecting our global supply chain. When we have these social governance rules that are imposed on Canadian businesses, it means that we will not be producing at the level that we should be producing.

We are actually being dependent on foreign countries to produce and import it, and that's why we will continue to have such large trade deficits. Some people will say, "Well, that tells you that you have a rich nation and you don't have to produce everything."

But we see what dependency can cause during COVID. Our basic PPEs we had to import, where we had the capacity to produce those here. And so we have to make sure that we're optimizing our capacity.

I also want to touch on the digital ID and this whole digitization of our economy. Yes, it is a transition to a new economy. The plan is for everything—our GDP would be calculated based on a new means of calculation that would have ingrained in it the carbon footprint.

And so the carbon footprint is almost going to replace what we know as our dollar. And when we see centralized digital banking currencies—when we see that emerging, that is creating the infrastructure.

And arguably, you could even argue that things such as digital currencies were a test ground for creation of that infrastructure of the new economy. That's why I think that my inclusion in the leadership race and in the future of Canada is so important because I've spent years studying what it is that we’ve been embarked upon.

Many people do not understand what is happening, how every calculation, everything that you do will be logged on that blockchain. The blockchain could see every single transaction.

And it's going to be recorded. And our entire lives are going to be equated on how much carbon footprint we contribute to society or how good we are at reducing our carbon footprint.

Right, right, right!

So that'll be the hallmark by which all ethical conduct will be evaluated. And you might say, "Well, the planet's in terrible shape, and the first thing we need to do is to reduce our carbon footprint."

But then I think, well, wait a second—are you so sure, like 100% to the bottom of your soul, that the most important thing we could possibly embark upon is carbon output reduction and nothing else?

So let me offer some other alternatives. If we're going to look at this in a broader sense, and I got a fair bit of this from people like Marion Tupy and Bjorn Lomborg, it's like, well, Lomborg has put together teams of economists to analyze where we get the biggest return per dollar spent, which isn't a bad metric unless you have a better one.

And he rank-ordered the UN's sustainability goals in terms of economic viability. And so let's make that clear—there are important things to pursue, they're important things to pursue internationally and nationally.

One of the ways we determine what's most important and should be funded is by looking at something like return on investment. If we spend a dollar, how much money does that generate in return?

And Lomborg, who put together 10 teams of economists who worked independently on this and then aggregated across their findings, showed that climate remediation spending doesn't even enter the top 20.

That if we really wanted to put the planet together in some long-term sense over the next few decades, we'd be funneling a lot more money into such things as absolute poverty reduction for poor children in the developing world because the return on investment for early childhood nutrition, for example, is about $250 to $1.

And so on the environmental side, well—and I can think of other environmental issues that are more pressing. So for example, I worked on the UN committee that set up some of the sustainability goals, and so I looked at this for a long time and I do think there are environmental problems, and climate change is one of them.

But where it should be placed on the list is not exactly clear. Certainly, I would say the problem of oceanic mismanagement is much more—not only pressing and vital but also remediable—where we actually know how to remediate it.

And trying to generate any public discussion on that front is virtually impossible. And so the environmentalists themselves, they jump on one issue, it's climate change. They say, "Oh, it's going to be a catastrophe."

And Bjorn Lomborg has done these calculations. He said, "Look, by the year 2100, given current economic projections, we're going to be about four times richer than we are now."

But that's going to be decreased to some degree because of the additional costs associated with climate change, but we'll only be 3.5 times richer. And then we can remediate most of that.

He's also done a death calculation showing that fewer people are likely to die in the future when it's warmer than die now because it's cold, and more people freeze to death than get overheated.

And so in terms of human catastrophe, it's not obvious at all—at least at the present time—that even if you accept the IPCC climate change prognostications, which you might as well for the sake of argument, it is not clear at all that bending and twisting our entire infrastructure by compulsion and force immediately in an emergency reaction that seeds all the power to the elite is actually going to solve any of these problems and not make them a lot worse.

That is a very, very good point. And therein lies the problem, that that is not their solution. Their solution is really one to transform our impact on the environment, and they believe that we are overpopulated, we have too many people and so we're over-consuming.

And because of our consumption patterns, if we can bring down our consumption patterns, then we will be able to reduce the impact on the environment. So that's essentially what they are trying to do.

Well that argument, hey! I put out a YouTube video last week, I wrote an article for The Telegraph about a Deloitte memo—a report that was produced in May—and the Deloitte consultants who are the Davos types basically said, "Well, you know, we're facing this environmental catastrophe, and so we've got to put the brakes on economic growth.

"And sure, that's going to cause some disruption in the short term, meaning, you know, the next five decades, but it'll be worth it at some point in the future."

And I think, well hold on a second here; you put a lot of economic pressure on the world supply chain system, food production, energy, and you're gonna starve a lot of really poor people.

And somehow you think that's okay? It's like here's the deal—the apocalypse is so nigh that we're gonna have to throw a billion or two billion people into absolute poverty again to make things better.

It's like what's your evidence that's going to make things better? Is Sri Lanka your evidence? Their aim is behavior modification and behavior modification of largely industrialized Western nations.

And so they can track that—if everything is digitized, if we all have digital IDs, if our digital IDs then are used to facilitate and navigate us through society, whether it is financial, whether it's a purchase, whether it's healthcare.

So your digital ID will be tied into the system and then you can monitor your consumption based on that. Even in the United States right now, like you could go into, I think it's Walgreens, and they have free coolers with products inside with locks on it.

In the future, it's predicted that those locks—you will be able to put in your digital ID. If you've had too much sugar, that ice cream fridge won't open for you.

And so it's a way to monitor your behavior, and that's what people are not looking at. They're not looking at all of the promises that have come out of the World Economic Forum, and they're not taking it very, very seriously.

Because we've had Klaus Schwab clearly state that he has penetrated Canada's cabinet, and to me that's a very, very serious thing for a global businessman to say about an independent democracy.

And we have even our Finance Minister that's sitting on the board—one of the boards of the World Economic Forum. Many Canadians are very, very concerned about that, and I think as a strong opposition we need to ask questions about that.

Because if these are concerns for Canadians, why are we afraid to delve into these issues of someone who has shown such an utter disrespect for our democracy to say that he's penetrated our cabinet?

Well, you know, I talked to some people who went to these Davos conferences a while back and who stopped going because of the twist that it took.

And I said, well, I asked them, very credible people by the way. I asked them, well, who is Klaus Schwab anyways? And the answer was, well he's a conference organizer!

I said, well how did he develop such a position of undue influence? And they said, well, he was very good at bringing what would you say, influential people together and helping them network, and that elevated them into a position of well, unparalleled authority in some sense.

It's like, yeah, fine! But we’re going to sacrifice our national sovereignty to this international cabal of misinformed, what would you call it, you two misinformed low-risk utilities who are willing to sacrifice the world's poor.

That's the plan; that seems like a really bad plan.

Okay, so let me push back at you on something here. So now people who are listening to this, especially critics of the way that you're thinking are going to say, well, there's Dr. Lewis getting all conspiratorial, and you know, isn't that just typical of a social conservative type?

So you talked about the danger of ESGs, and everyone listening should know what those are—ESG, that's worse than diversity, inclusivity and equity by the way, by a large margin.

And so there's the ESG problem, there's the digital ID problem, there's the globalist utopian centralizing problem. Why shouldn't you just be dismissed as a socially conservative conspiracy theorist?

What makes you think—and this is really a serious question, you know, because the world's pretty weird right now, and it's not that easy to protect yourself against becoming conspiratorial, let's say—or seeing conspiracies?

What makes you think that your analysis of this situation is balanced and reasonable and that Canadians could rely on you for your judicious wisdom?

Well, you've earned a PhD, so you know the grit and the rigor that it goes through that you go through to earn a PhD. So I respect knowledge; any information that I put out there, it's well-researched.

I often, if I'm quoting somebody, it's from their own words. The problem is that the term "conspiracy theory" has been used to absolve politicians of their responsibility to answer questions. It's a psychop term that’s been used to gaslight.

Even right now, the United Nations has a program that they put out on conspiracy theories, on how to deal with a conspiracy theory. What they tell you is that if you see something that you don't agree with that you believe is a conspiracy theory—report the person, write to their editor. This is all a form of bullying.

Labeling something as a conspiracy theory is an easy way for you not to deal with the issue at hand by just dismissing it. Me, someone with a PhD, I respect knowledge and I have taken a lot of time to write to the members of the Conservative Party, and everything I write, I document.

At one point when I was telling people that our government enrolled in a program called the Known Traveler Digital ID Program, which is a World Economic Forum program, people said, "No, that cannot be! Why would our government enroll in the Known Traveler Digital ID Program with the World Economic Forum?"

When I sent them the link and they could go directly to Canada, to the Government of Canada’s website, they could see that we actually have done these things.

So many things what the government does is that they put people in a place of willful blindness to make them feel that embarrassed somehow for actually listening to the things that they tell them that they're going to do.

Justin Trudeau, after COVID, said, "This is an opportunity for us to reset and re-imagine our future." He said that! He used those words! Then when people said, "When people said, 'Oh, this is what you're planning to do,' then he says, 'Oh no, it's a conspiracy.'"

They're gaslighting you. And to be honest with you, I'm a very educated person and I do not care if somebody labels me a conspiracy theorist because it just means that they're not intelligent enough to argue with me, that's all it means.

And so I do—I really don't care. My goal is I'm going to save my country. I'm going to do everything that I can to save my country.

I'm going to invest every single ounce of my skill set to making sure that I remain a Canadian citizen and not a global citizen. And I am going to continue to inform people.

So there's no shame; you can call me anything you want. I'm going to continue to speak, I'm going to continue to get my message out there, and I'm going to continue to send Canadians information and substantiate what I say with information so Canadians can be informed about what their government is planning for them.

All right, so you're in this race with Pauliev, Charest, Charae, Baber, and HSN, and Pauliev is the front runner at the moment, by quite a substantial margin.

You have no—but you keep saying that but you haven't provided me with any documentation to substantiate that. In fact, the media will want you to believe that, okay?

Well, let me ask you this then. So my understanding is that Pauliev was ahead of the rest of the candidates on the Conservative front in terms of the number of memberships sold in the Conservative Party. Is that correct?

That's what he said. That's not—I have seen no proof of that. That's what he said—he revealed those numbers. I can tell you that many of the people that signed up on his website were my supporters because he sent messages to everybody's supporters telling them to sign up on their website.

So even a few days before the membership ended, people who had already signed up with me got a message from his campaign saying that they were members. So they went and resigned, so there were a lot of duplicates in there.

So we do not have the accurate numbers on who sold what.

Where do you see the relative standing of the current candidates within the Conservative membership?

So I sold substantially more memberships this time than the last time when I won the popular vote. I do not want to get into the numbers because when you add up what Mr. Pauliev said, what Mr. Brown said, the existing numbers, it's impossible.

So I know that there are untruths in there, and I don't think there's any benefit for me in weighing in that way. What I can tell you is that we now have the membership list, and we've reached out to the membership list.

I can tell you, Mr. Pauliev, is very strong, but Mr. Charest is not ahead of me. The media will want you to believe that Mr. Charest is ahead of me because they have been promoting him.

In fact, I've done phenomenally well with almost no media attention, and the media will try to push as much as they can the candidate that they prefer. Of course, they don't prefer me because I speak a lot of truths that they just do not want to engage in at this time.

But Canadians are listening. Canadians are doing their research. There's lots of information out there, and the membership is very, very interested in a number of issues that people are not talking about, such as the impact of global organizations upon our sovereignty.

Right, right. Which seems to be a particular and pointed concern of yours.

And so, okay, so let me ask you then. What distinguishes you apart from your concern about the influence—undue influence—of these international organizations?

What distinguishes you from the other candidates? Why should Canadians vote for you compared to them?

And then also, I would like to hear—we've spent a lot of time delving into a criticism, let's say, of the utopian globalist environmental top-down approach to planetary stewardship.

I'd like to hear something about if you could have the Canada you wanted, it's Canada that you would work towards as leader of the Conservative Party and putative Prime Minister, what would Canada look like under your stewardship?

Let's start with the comparative question first on the Conservative front. What are you offering? What are you bringing to Canadians that distinguishes you from the other candidates?

Well, I am not a career politician. I have just entered politics, and so I can relate to average Canadians. I know what it's like to not know where money is going to come from to pay your bills at the end of the month.

I know what it's like to start a business from ground up and not be able to draw a salary because you have to pay your employees. I know what it's like to stand in a grocery line and not know whether or not your debit card is going to go through.

I can connect with average Canadians, whereas career politicians, they've had paychecks that have been given to them by the tax—from the taxpayers.

I have signed the front of a paycheck. The average politician has only signed the back of a paycheck, and so that ability to relate to average Canadians is something that I think is very important.

I also think my educational and experiential background is something that's really topical and needed at this particular time in our nation's history. At this particular time, as I said, we have a lot of international organizations encroaching on our freedoms and our liberties.

And somebody with international experience that can dissect these treaties and understand how these treaties affect our sovereignty is very, very important.

I also believe, as an educator, I've taught, as I said, at York University, University of Toronto, Osgoode Hall Law School, and I am an educator. And so I can break down complex issues.

I don't speak to Canadians through slogans and talking points. I speak to their hearts because I can connect with them on these issues, and some high-level issues that most many politicians would say, "It’s not worth discussing that with them," I'm able to communicate with Canadians and give them informative information that will allow them to make an educated decision.

And I think that that is some of the main differing factors for me.

Okay, so I'm going to sum that up. So you said, well, you come from a background that's similar, say, economically to the bulk of Canadians. You also have that in that struggling immigrant experience very close to you and your family.

You've started your own business. I want to ask you a few questions about that. So you're familiar with, uh, what would you say—enterprises on the entrepreneurial front, which is a big deal. You're a very highly educated person.

And one of the things that is very interesting about your resume is that your education is very diverse, especially given your political stance because you're quite well versed in postmodern and Marxist thought, given your education in Sociology, Women's Studies, and Environmental Studies.

And then we can add to that, which I want to talk about as well, your legal studies and then your teaching. So, and then you're also an educator.

And so that's a nice—that's a nice combination, as you said, especially now navigating the complex things we're navigating. We got to your master's degree at York. Tell me a little bit about two things: about your legal training and your teaching and then about your business.

So by way of background, legal training—I started off on Bay Street in a firm called Goodman and Carr. They've since merged into different firms, and I had quite good Bay Street experience.

Then I went to Learners, which is also a large litigation firm, and then ended at Thomson Rogers. Thereafter, I made the decision to have a more balanced life with young children and a new family.

And so we made the decision that I would start my own business, and that gave me an opportunity to work late at night while being at home, wake up early in the morning, and have more quality time with my family.

So you were at some big firms—and tell me also about the details of your legal education. You have a PhD in law from Osgoode Hall, from Osgoode—that's one of Toronto or Canada's top law schools, by the way.

And so you have that stellar legal education, which is not an easy thing to obtain. And then you have large law firm experience, which, by the way, is also not easy to attain because the application process for articling at these firms is extremely intense and the process of moving towards partnership is extremely competitive, like—and I mean exceptionally competitive.

And so then you have small children, you have children and you had a family; you decided to start your own firm?

Yes!

Okay!

And tell me about that; tell me what that was like and when you did that.

Oh, that was really interesting because I came from Bay Street, which you have large clients, and fortunately my last job on Bay Street, I was working for the—it was the largest personal injury law firm at that time.

And so you had a combination of corporate clients, insurance companies, and you also had personal injury clients. So I was able to transition that way because my clients liked me.

And so I was able to buy out my clientele and transition it to my new firm. But the problem is that personal injury—the lawyers have to carry the file, so they pay for all the medicals, etc.

Because the injured party is usually not working, and so that put a lot of financial strain. It was—we had numerous discussions with my husband about the strain that it was putting on our family, being able to do that, because I had to get a line of credit to do that.

And so I had to go for low-hanging fruit because those claims settled in two years, so I had to go for low-hanging fruit. So I decided to pick up criminal law because that way you could do quick bail hearings.

And then I was doing some duty council per diem work, which would, which basically you were basically like a court lawyer, a crown lawyer, but for the defense side doing duty council, and you would get paid from the government.

So I picked that up doing that per diem, filling in and also then trying to do some private criminal cases in order to sustain things as I went along.

And then after that, I had to pick up real estate too to kind of make ends meet. And then I added on a really unique area of immigration.

So you were like a sole practitioner initially in just taking whichever files because you had to pay the bills and so I added on immigration and then I developed into a very niche area of immigration dealing with LGBTQ cases—refugee cases of people who were fleeing their country because of LGBTQ+ persecution.

Are you sure you're not a closet leftist operative? I mean, you've got Women's Studies, you've got Sociology, and now you were a lawyer on the LGBTQ+ front on immigration issues.

I think you're probably a Klaus Schwab plant!

No, on refugee issues because these people—well think about it, no matter how—what your political beliefs are, if you see somebody being persecuted and running for their life and is going to be killed because of their sexual orientation, it's just humanity would tell you that if you have skills, you would lend it to those individuals to me—it's a no-brainer!

Right!

I had the skill set that I could work in these communities, and so I did.

And so to me that's just a human thing to do, and I live my life like that. I try to live my life to honor my upbringing, which is an upbringing based on faith—loving your neighbor as yourself—and that means standing in a role that is very non-judgmental of people and doing the right thing.

And as a lawyer, I pledged to help those who are in need. To me, it's no different than if you're a criminal lawyer and you're put on a case where somebody—it's a murder case—you may have to work on that case.

So, okay, so we walk through what distinguishes you from the other candidates, what you bring to the table, your business acumen, your legal extensive legal training and practice in multiple areas, including large law firms and then all these private practice niches that you carved out, which I suspect would make quite a story in and of itself as you're doing that with small kids in a developing family and outside the protective net of the big law firms—competitive as they are; very diverse in the positive sense of the word educational background, including an emphasis on the kind of law that would make you an astute analyst of international agreements, as well as an educator.

Final question I think before we switch to the Daily Wire section, which is a behind-the-scenes look at the development of your career if you could have the Canada you wanted as leader of the country 10 years down the road, what would you focus and concentrate on?

What would you bring to the table for Canadians?

The most important thing that I see is really our freedoms and our sovereignty. I would want a Canada in which I am still a Canadian citizen, and I'm very concerned that we are moving towards a global citizenship.

And so the preservation of our sovereignty would be one of the main things that I focus on. And in preserving our sovereignty, we need to preserve our institutions that really make this country great.

And right now what we're seeing is a nihilistic approach to eliminating all of the institutions upon which this country was founded on. We're seeing an erosion of our military, our army, and erosion—you’re seeing movements to defund the police.

You're seeing an erosion of our family—parental rights! Parents are feeling that they don't have the right to raise their children in accordance with their own values.

Parents are feeling that the government are encroaching too much on their parental sovereignty, and these are loving parents who would ordinarily do the right thing, but governments are stepping in loco parentis and acting as if they are the guardians and soul custodians over children, and they have stated that.

And we have seen even some United Nations programs, if you look at the Comprehensive Sex Education program that the United Nations is pushing with Planned Parenthood, you can see that there’s an undermining of the fabric of our society—in terms of parental rights and in terms of what parents believe that their children should be exposed to at an age-appropriate level.

Okay, so you're looking at a platform that insists upon individual autonomy and responsibility, the same thing being true at the family level, the same thing being true at the civic level, and then preservation of Canadian sovereignty.

And yes, yes, the economic level is imperative also because that is what I believe is going to be the impetus in transitioning us from Canadian citizenship to global citizenship.

So we have to ensure that we can continue to remain economically viable, bringing our supply chains home, making sure that we produce what we need in order to sustain ourselves, optimizing our potential, encouraging industries like in our agricultural industry, encouraging our resource development, being good stewards of the resources that we have been granted.

Right now, even off the coast of the Arctic, we have countries like China and Russia actually mining freely, mining our minerals. We have no protection of that. Why? Because we have not invested in our military.

Russia has 40 submarine icebreakers; we have zero. We don't have the capacity to protect our own resources in our own Arctic.

And so a functioning and vibrant Canada recognizes not just investment in our human potential in the fabric of our society, but also recognizing that we can be self-sustaining both economically and politically.

And when I say politically, I mean from a standpoint of keeping global organizations at bay and recognizing our sovereignty and not taking our cues from organizations like the WEF, the World Economic Forum, the WHO—the World Health Organization—and the United Nations.

We need to ensure that any treaties that we sign on to do not undermine our national sovereignty.

All right, well that sounds like a fairly comprehensive package. It reminds me of—there's a principle of subsidiarity I think that was originally insisted upon by the Catholics, but that's become part of conservative political doctrine, which is that every responsibility should be meted out to the most proximal possible source.

So for example, for each individual has a domain of responsibility that shouldn't be encroached on by the family, and each family has a domain of responsibility that shouldn't be encroached on by the community.

And the towns have their level that the provinces and states should leave alone and the states have their level that the federal government should leave alone and so forth.

And so an intelligent conservatism distributes responsibility all the way down the hierarchy to the level of the individual, and that protects us against the kind of Tower of Babel