Alberta: The Promised Land for Canada’s Future | Premier Danielle Smith | EP 465

I talked to a young analyst who was looking and tracking at Justin Trudeau's declining popularity, and he also was tracking the number of mortgage renewals that are happening each month. It tracks perfectly. Then they look around and say, "Who's caused this?" The obvious answer is the guys who've been in charge for the last nine years. It’s happening in real time and happening very quickly, and it will probably accelerate.

So, I'm talking today to Premier Danielle Smith of Alberta. And Alberta is a very interesting province because it's extremely energy-rich, fossil fuels in particular. Alberta is perhaps the foremost jurisdiction in the world where the battle between anti-human green environmentalism and the industries that promote cheap and accessible energy is being fought. It’s always interesting to me to concentrate on the situation in Alberta because it has international repercussions.

I'll give you an example: within the last two years, both the leaders of Germany and Japan have come to Canada asking for liquid natural gas. Premier Trudeau, our narcissist-in-chief, has decided that that interferes with his vision of, I don’t know, his progression through the WEF ranks or something like that. God only knows. But we turned Germany and Japan away, cap in hand, which was a colossal error. That’s a good example of why what's happening in Alberta has international significance.

So, I talked to Premier Danielle Smith, a very sharp lady today, about the conflict between the energy industry and the radical environmentalists being played out in Canada. Justin Trudeau is what I would say the face of top-down globalism. He’s a top-down globalist utopian who would ravage the poor in their counterproductive attempts to save the planet. We talked about the development of an invitational vision on the conservative side—what it is that conservatives have to offer young people. It’s essentially something approximating the invitation to the responsible adventure of life, a vision predicated on the idea that the best things you do in your life will be associated with your willingness to take responsibility.

So, we might as well dive right in and attack something simple, and that would be Bill C-59, let’s say. What would you say the relationship between federal energy and environment policies is? Well, let’s call it the whole economy of the West, and probably of Canada as well. Do you want to first lay out the territory with regard to Bill C-59 because that was the occasion for this particular conversation?

Well, it's funny because Bill C-59 reminded me of American policymaking, where ostensibly it’s about one thing, and then they stuff in hundreds of pages of other things knowing that it has to pass. All those terrible other addendums are going to pass along with it because this is the budget implementation act. It had to pass because of our parliamentary system. If you don’t pass the budget, you end up having to go to an election. So you end up having to swallow a lot of terrible policy because there are things in there that you support, like there are things in there that we do support as well when it comes to some of the tax measures that they're taking. But what they slid in at the last minute was this crazy policy that had initially been put forward by one of our most extreme NDP members of Parliament, Charlie Angus, who’s not even running again. This is kind of his last-ditch effort, I guess, to try to have an influence on the national stage.

Katherine McKenna, the former environment minister, has been hired on as a UN envoy—on, I don’t know, is it a UN envoy on Earth truth or something? I don’t know what it is, but it’s very clear that she had an influence in sliding into this budget implementation bill making it illegal for the energy sector—oil and gas—to talk about their positive environmental record. What they're doing to reduce emissions, the successes that they’ve had in addressing the environment, is now rendered essentially illegal unless they can conform with some kind of international standard for reporting, which is undefined. Nobody knows what that is: international standard—who’s setting those? What are they? No one knows.

The industry is very fearful that they're going to end up with a whole pile of frivolous lawsuits that will bind them in the courts for months, or in our case of our country, years. As a result, this is what has happened: the energy industry takes the path of least resistance. They want to focus on creating prosperity and investment in developing resources. They don’t want to be fighting extreme eco-justice warriors about whether or not they were overstating any particular U measure of their history.

What we're seeing now is that the only people who are going to be allowed in this space are, quite frankly, many times, are not telling the truth about our energy sector. And I think that is not good for Canada; it’s not good for our province; it’s certainly not good for the world because we want to be the reliable provider of energy to our trade partners. I think they've taken us a step backward with this—a massive step backward.

Okay, so let’s delve into this a little bit. I do remember that this bill came up—the one you're referring to—about a year or a year and a half ago, and the buzz around it was that it essentially criminalized speech related to the promotion of the fossil fuel industry. There was enough of a furor around that it seemed to kill it, but obviously, it just went underground and re-emerged in this more serpentine form—a very underhanded move.

So how, okay, first of all, why is this not unconstitutional? Second, why can't the corporations already be prosecuted for fraud if that’s actually what they're engaged in or false advertising? And then these international standards that hypothetically exist—who sets them, even in principle? Is that an elected body, or is that some unelected cabal of top-down globalists like the UN? Let’s start with—well, why isn’t this an unconstitutional move? Why isn’t this another obligation of free speech in Canada?

It is, and this is the thing that’s so remarkable: I was reading an analysis of the Liberals, and the Liberals are the most illiberal government we’ve ever had. When you look at what liberalism—classical liberalism—is supposed to stand for, it's supposed to stand for those foundational freedoms. Foundational freedoms that I thought were enshrined in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, certainly enumerated in various Bills of Rights, and freedom of conscience and the ability to speak your mind is the first enumerated freedom. Yet, it is being trampled all over—whether it's with the internet censorship bills, whether it's the hollowing out of the media and them having to scrabble after federal dollars, and I don’t know what kind of strings are attached there are associated with that, or whether it is what we're seeing now with the speech codes—whether it’s in universities, professional associations, and now this is a new speech code. It’s a speech code on the energy sector.

The good news is that they have a carve-out for the other orders of government. As the leader of the Alberta government, and we are the owner of this resource, oil and natural gas—we own about 85% of the resource. I have made it very clear that we are not going to stop our advocacy. What we hope to be is that source of solid information about our environmental record, and then by providing that validation and showing our work, showing our sources, we hope we’ll be able to give that same information to the other advocacy groups and industries so that we can all go forward together.

But that’s the situation we now find ourselves in: we’re having to have a government take on the role of being the advocate because they’re crowding out the private voices, which I think has got to be the most illiberal approach to take to this discussion of these kinds of issues. So we are intending, on behalf of the industry, to challenge this from a constitutional perspective and to challenge it as well from a charter perspective, and as we put together that lawsuit, we will be reaching out to others to see if they want to join us as well because we’ve had some success in beating back the federal government. It takes years; it takes a lot of money—that's why they do these things. It's because they have a period of time where it is the law of the land until you can get it struck down through the various stages of the court. In the meantime, they put such a chill on investment that they achieve their target regardless because they’ve just put it as the fact by having it implemented in their parliament. It’s so irresponsible.

What would happen if the oil companies, if the fossil fuel companies used information that you had already promoted? That is what we're hoping.

Okay, okay, we’re hoping that we'll be able to almost provide a shield that if we become—because you asked who sets the standards—well, guess what? I think we set the standard. I mean, we—under our constitution, we have the right to develop our resource and get them to market. Part of getting them to market is also making sure that we can tell the environmental message because the other part of it too—and I've spoken with energy executives about this as they're trying to navigate through it—they actually have an international requirement in reporting to their shareholders as publicly traded companies to talk about their environmental record. You can’t have both of those things; you have to be able to give them that latitude.

So, we are hoping to be able to provide them a bit of that shield and be able to also lead on the legal issues and the judicial issues. But make no mistake, there's only one reason why this was put into the legislation at the last minute, and it's because the liberal government with their NDP supporters want to crush any confidence in developing our energy sector. They want to crush the production of oil and natural gas, even though they use weasel words to try to pretend otherwise. There is an agenda to keep it in the ground. We do not agree; we believe we can reduce emissions.

Okay, so let’s delve into that a little bit. I mean, first of all, what do you actually think their vision for the Canadian economy might be? Canada is a very resource-dependent country, and we’ve done a very, very bad job of differentiating ourselves in a more sophisticated way. Certainly, certainly under the liberal leadership in Ottawa, they've done a disastrous job of assuring an increase in Canadian productivity. I think we’re now down to 60% on average GDP production per capita compared to the US, with real estate that’s twice as expensive, right? It’s worse than what’s the state. Oh, I can’t remember the—it's the lowest rank in United States states. Canada is now equivalent to, in terms of GDP productivity, and with much more expensive real estate, so that's just absolutely appalling.

Do you think that underlying all this, like what the hell's driving this is this merely climate paranoia of the type that’s fostered by the WEF? Is that what's going on? Because it—and is there an idea that's lurking in the back of what passes for the minds of people like Steve Guo, something like the promotion of degrowth, because that's actually the only way out of the climate catastrophe? Like, I don't understand what's lurking at the bottom of this precisely and so I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that matter.

Well, I think it goes back further. I mean, I started studying the environmental movement when I was an intern at the Fraser Institute in ’95, ’96, just after some of the early climate conferences. But that’s when I learned about the Rio Summit and the role that a Canadian by the name of Morris Strong had played in asserting that we needed to put up an approach on emissions reduction that was very aggressive. There has been— I think it goes back further than that to the Club of Rome concept that came out in the late 1960s and earlier than that, Paul Erlich and Limits to Growth. This whole notion that the world did not have enough resources to be able to keep up with the population growth; that we would ultimately outpace our ability to feed ourselves—that was sort of the flawed principle that came out of the late 1960s and early 70s.

I mean, if you look at the culture and how it's shaped by movies, you may recall the movie Soylent Green. It talked about a catastrophic future, which I think we've now superseded in the date they expected it to happen, where we’d run out of food so you had to have a manufactured product to keep people alive. This is the flawed premise that goes all the way back there, and it doesn’t matter how much we're able to develop new resources and increase food productivity and outpace the global population with our production. They still stay with that flawed premise.

You hear it even today where they talk about you need five Earths to be able to support the number of people we have on the planet now. Well, that's just simply not true because the way economics works is as something becomes more scarce and precious, someone will find a substitute product. It’s been the history that we always find a solution to meet these concerns; that’s how supply and demand works.

So, I think it goes back even further, and one of the reasons I mentioned Morris Strong is he was an appointee in Justin Trudeau's father's era—in Pierre Elliott Trudeau's era—and I think that is the vision that our prime minister has. He felt like that was a moment of relevance for Canada: "Look at us; we are going to be the first to go forward on these kinds of aggressive policies." It’s the only way I can understand when he got re-elected for him to use the international forum he had to say Canada’s back—in the worst possible way for Canadians, which is the tax on productivity.

I’ve actually heard the carbon tax referred to as a sin tax on productivity, which helps to identify the way they look at the production of methane and carbon dioxide. All of the attendant policies that have been put forward are far more aggressive than any of our trading partners in establishing net-zero policies by 2050. No, that’s not good enough; it’s got to be 2035 or 2030, or we’ve got to have unrealistic targets to phase out combustion engine vehicles faster than anyone else. I think it’s really just this flawed interpretation of what it means to be relevant on the international stage.

I mean, I think being relevant on the international stage for Canada means meeting our commitment on defense spending, being a reliable ally when we go into conflict zones, making sure that we have an effective immigration system so that we can assimilate people into our economy and not drive up and have massive inflation, manage our money supply effectively, manage our passports so that we can ensure that we’ve got those kinds of documents available without months or years' worth of waits.

I mean, there are some very practical things that we can see the federal government do to be relevant on the international stage. How about provide natural gas to Germany and Japan? So, like they ask.

100%—100%! I mean, to have foreign—this is part of what I was observing in before I got into this position: the world assumes when they come to Canada that the leader—the prime minister of the country—is going to be an advocate for the country and an advocate for resource development. It’s part of the reason we structured our country the way we did. We’ve given trade and commerce powers and we've given international trade power agreements to our federal government to negotiate in our best interest on our behalf, and he’s using it for the reverse.

He’s actually using it to put up trade barriers, not build the infrastructure that we need and interfere with our ability to get our product to market. It's part of the reason I’ve had to take the stance that I've had. It’s not the role necessarily of a provincial premier, a subnational government, to have to go to the, you know, COP28 or COP29 international conferences, but if we're not there, our voice doesn’t get heard; our story doesn’t get told.

We don’t have an opportunity to talk to international trading partners—whether it’s Germany or South Korea or Japan or India—about how we might be able to solve their energy security problems. I found myself as—you’ve got a federal prime minister who seems to be more interested in doing my job—talking about dentistry programs and school lunch programs. I'm finding increasingly I’m having to do his job in reaching out to the world and making them know that we are going to be a trading partner and we are going to be a secure supply of not only energy but food as well. So that's the weird upside-down nature we find ourselves in in Canada right now.

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So, a couple of things on that. Paul Erlich, who wrote The Population Bomb and his doomsday predictions, made a very famous bet with an economist, Julian Simon. He asked Simon to propose a basket of commodities, and they bet on whether those would be less or more expensive by the year 2000—because that was the doomsday date as far as Dr. Erlich was concerned. He famously, Simon—who was an absolute genius as opposed to Erlich, who certainly presumed he was one—famously collected on that bet shortly after the Millennium switch because the basket of commodities became far less expensive rather than more expensive.

There was more of everything, and of course, the entire economic history of the world since that point has indicated exactly that. The reason for that is because it really started to accelerate after 1989 was that the developing countries, in particular, stopped generating the absolutely catastrophic economic policies that were part and parcel of the Communist deal and just mostly got the hell out of the way of their people. All of a sudden, we had no problem whatsoever feeding the 9 billion people that are on the planet, and we could all—we're going to peak out at something like 13, maybe less. There’s absolutely no doubt that we can manage that number of people.

So, this whole zero-sum terror streak is, I think, a means by which those who wish to obtain power by utilizing fear can terrorize the public into giving them the reins. It’s something like that. Now, I wanted to ask you more specifically about pollution because it seems that the energy industry in general has taken the wrong tack with the green environmentalists by trumpeting their successes on the emission reduction front. They’ve lent credence to the idea that we face, say, a carbon dioxide crisis.

Now, I know particular emissions are an unpleasant and unhealthy thing, and it’s definitely good for companies to produce the least amount of waste they can while they’re producing, but I’ve been looking as deeply as I can manage into the carbon dioxide issue for about ten years. My sense is that if you take a dispassionate look at the data, carbon dioxide production on behalf of the fossil fuel companies is a net good. I have two reasons to believe that: one of them comes mostly from work that I got introduced to through Patrick Moore because Moore has documented what I think is the unassailable fact that we are currently in a carbon dioxide drought by natural standards extending back let's say over a period of time of approximately 100 million years.

Time frame really matters: we were actually approaching a carbon dioxide level that was sufficiently low so that plants were struggling to survive. One of the things that’s happened—there’s that. And I looked at his data, and it's not his data specifically, but the data that he's aggregated. It seems to me to be much more powerful than the alternative explanation that, you know, compared to 500 years ago, there's more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

It’s like, well, what bloody time frame are you looking at there, guys? You can’t just pick some arbitrary time frame that fits your story. So we’re low on carbon dioxide. Now, one of the consequences of that and some proof that he’s right is that NASA itself has indicated that the planet has become 20% greener since the year 2000. That's cool in a variety of ways. It's, number one, 20% is a lot; it’s a surface area equivalent to twice the continental US. So like that’s a big deal.

Plus, that’s produced a 133% increment in food production because crops do better. Plus, the greening has taken place in precisely the semi-arid areas where the climate doomsayers said the deserts would expand. They’re not expanding; they're contracting. When I look at all the data, I mean, you could make the case that if we change the atmospheric constituents, the rate of change is rapid enough so there will be some disruption, so maybe we aim for not rapidly transforming large biological systems—that's a reasonable rule of thumb—but on the carbon dioxide side, as far as I can tell, all the evidence is positive.

Plus, there's another fact that Bjorn Lomberg has nailed home very effectively, which is that people don’t die from heat—especially in the Northern Hemisphere—they die from cold. It has already been the case that the measures taken by the EU, for example, to recommend that people turn down their thermostats have produced a spike in deaths, especially among the elderly.

So our enemy in the North isn’t heat; it’s cold. The reason I’m going through all of that is because I think the fossil fuel industry has made a big mistake. Controlling particulate pollution and, what would you say, the production of the kind of waste that pollutes territory—which is concerned with the oil sands in particular—I can understand why they’re proud of their accomplishments on that ground, and perhaps you could even give some credit to the environmentalists for pushing that along. But on the carbon dioxide side, by being apologetic, I think that they're just validating the claims of exactly the people you described.

These are the zero-sum anti-human depopulationists that are motivated by, of all people, Paul Erlich—who couldn’t have possibly been more wrong scientifically in his prognostications. You know, he could say, "Well, what I said was true; the time frame was wrong." It’s like, no buddy, if you’re going to make a scientific prediction, you have to specify the time frame. You don’t get to say, "Well, eventually, I’ll be right.” It’s like, no, sorry—that’s not a bet. Or it is a bet that you can’t possibly lose, and then it's not a scientific hypothesis.

So, I don’t know what you think about that, but I’ve been wrestling with this because I’ve been very unhappy with the environmentalists and their anti-human bent for a long time. But it’s actually shocked me that when I took what I think is a dispassionate look at the data that you can make a very strong case that we know enough now to presume that carbon dioxide increase is a beneficial byproduct of the very fossil fuel industries that have enabled us to lift the poor worldwide out of poverty.

That, I guess, that’s the last point. There’s one other thing that’s relevant too. Lomberg reviewed data showing that if you get poor people up to a level of income that exceeds $5,000 a year GDP per capita, their time frame switches so that they start becoming concerned about issues that will affect their children and their grandchildren because they’re not scrabbling around in the damn dirt trying to find enough dung to have fires for lunch. You know? And so they can think into the future; they start taking local environmental action.

What that implies—and the data support this, as far as I can tell—is that if you provide cheap energy to the poor, which is essentially wealth, then they take a long-term view of the world and they start greening the planet. They don’t have to eat the animals that are local; they start to have some wealth so they can concern themselves with a viewpoint that’s 40 or 50 years long.

So, like, that’s a lot of data on the pro-fossil fuel side—like a lot. And so I don't understand why the fossil fuel industry, and maybe the Alberta government as well, just doesn’t flip to the offensive instead of even instead of giving the devil his due. Because there’s a big devil there, and you don’t want to give it too much due.

That is a lot to respond to. So the essence of the question is: did the energy sector make a mistake in trying to rise to the challenge that had been put in front of them? Maybe. Maybe they became enticed by the engineering challenge of being able to do it. Maybe they became enticed by the notion that they could figure this out, and as a result, they began going down a pathway of saying, “Yeah, these are the kind of things we can do. This is the kind of progress that we’re making,” not really realizing that as they began to make progress, the goalposts would continue to be moved.

Because what I have seen—and part of my role in government has been to see what industry is saying. When I came in, I heard industry saying that they could get to net-zero by 2050. We have a number of projects here where they've already been able to do that, and it's gained because of a marvel of technology and ingenuity—they've figured out how to capture CO2 and bury it underground. The reason why they did that in our province was for very good reasons.

Once you capture the CO2 and you put it in reservoirs that have been depressurized, you can actually repressurize and you can develop more oil. So there’s a very practical reason why we developed this expertise. So, that is the way I would explain it: that because we could do it, the energy industry went down a pathway of thinking they would get remuneration by the market for doing it. That if we become the best barrel in the market—which is what everyone says they want, the greenest barrel in the market—we should be able to get a premium for that.

If we can develop the technology to capture CO2 and put it to a useful purpose, then that should be ultimately able to develop a revenue stream. Those are good reasons, actually, to engage in free enterprise. I would tell you that that’s the history of our energy sector—that we take a product that we need. It was initially kerosene and there was a whole bunch of sludge left over. Then somebody said, “Gee, I wonder what I could do with that sludge?” Out of that, we developed petrochemicals and lubricants and asphalt and all kinds of other useful products.

We now get 6,000 products out of a barrel of oil. I think the industry looked at the CO2 challenge as just the next waste stream that we’ve got to try to find something useful for us to do with it. So, if it’s framed that way, that’s why I’ve been very supportive of the industry in going down this pathway. In fact, part of the reason we’re able to feed so many people on the planet is something very similar: it was a chemistry breakthrough of Haber where they figured out how to capture nitrogen from the air and turn it into fertilizer.

But I think that—you touched on it when I’m so glad you told the story about Julian Simon in the bet with Paul. It was very much in my mind as I was giving my first answer to you. But I remember when I got into property rights advocacy, which was very shortly after my time at the Fraser Institute, I read an article about how the way in which tyrannical governments exercise control over their populace is they control energy and they control food.

If you keep people impoverished and hungry, and you keep them unable to heat their homes or cook their food, that is a way in which you—if you’re bent towards trying to control your population as opposed to seeing human flourishment—those are the two mechanisms that you use. I’ve been, having read that article probably in the late 1990s, it’s been fascinating and shocking and disheartening for me to see that all of the policies being devised by the extreme environmental movement have been to control exactly those two things: make energy more costly and less available, make food more costly and less available.

I think it comes down to this fear that goes—has been unsubstantiated—that it is going to result in a calamity for humanity. I’m a cornucopian; I think that’s the alternative view—that the more we unlock human ingenuity, the more we feed people, educate people, give them access to energy, give them access to innovation, the more we will flourish, the more things we will discover. I think that is just a much more hopeful view of humanity.

So when it comes to what should the energy industry do now? I don't mind the energy industry still trying to take an aspirational approach to continuing to innovate and finding solutions because I think we’re going to find some really interesting solutions for CO2 since we already have found one that makes economic sense. But I think that we have to talk in terms of why we want to continue delivering this product.

We have to talk in terms of eliminating global poverty, acknowledging that three billion or more people on the planet do not have our same quality of life. They’re cooking their food with dung and wood and coal, dying of indoor air quality problems. I’ve been very interested to see that Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman Al Saud, who’s the energy minister in Saudi Arabia, when he gives presentations, speaks very much along the same lines I do: “Yes, let’s reduce emissions, but let’s also solve the problem of global poverty.”

We’ve got to bring everybody up to our level first. You cannot cut off the avenue for prosperity in these nations prematurely. I think that is where the conservative messaging should be: “Yes, let’s continue to get better and better at having less impact on the environment, but let’s make sure that we’re bringing everybody up.”

The radical left have indicated very, very clearly their willingness to sacrifice the poor to the planet, right? And this shocked me, actually, you know, because I could see a tension developing between the low energy prices that were clearly necessary to continue lifting the world’s poor out of poverty—which you would think would be the primary concern of the left, right? In principle, they stand for the marginalized and oppressed, and in principle, perhaps primarily along the economic dimension, at least—that was the classic left that we had contended with for a century in the West.

But now we saw on the energy and environment front that the nature worship—the characteristic of the followers of ideology—let's say will trump any concern whatsoever for the inhabitants of Africa, to point to one place in particular, right? Because the Africans are energy poor and so are the Indians and, to some degree, the Chinese, although they’re rectifying that very, very rapidly.

So, it seems to me that there’s an unbelievable opportunity for the classic liberals who are willing to divorce themselves from the idiot progressives and the conservatives to say, “No, look, if you want a real policy to alleviate poverty, there isn’t any that you can do that even comes close to the provision of cheap energy by whatever means.”

Now, you want to keep the pollution under control but then if it is actually the case that increasing wealth at the bottom decreases environmental load—which seems to be the case, or at least you can make that argument and credibly—then, well, that’s a pretty win-win solution for everyone: no more poverty and a wiser populace with regards to environmental issues from the bottom up instead of the top down.

That’s a good vision, and it’s an excellent vision. I’d add one more on top of it because it actually improves the planet from an environmental point of view. You’d mentioned Bjorn Lomberg, and I think Michael Shellenberger has done good work on this as well, but one of the things that I have heard as I’ve gone out talking about the value proposition that Alberta has to offer is that I’m told that if we don’t provide that secure supply of LNG so that they can be using it for their energy needs, they’re actually quite worried in places like the Asian countries and in India that if we can’t provide them with whether it’s ammonia or LNG or some kind of hydrogen carrier, that they’re just going to have to keep on developing coal.

Of course, they will! Of course! Well, coal has advantages; you can stockpile coal. Like Matt, all you have to do is put it in a pile; it’s pretty straightforward. So, of course, they’re going to turn to coal because there’s absolutely no way that these developing countries, where most of the people are, are going to be able to withstand the pressure from the population with regards to the necessity of economic growth.

We already saw this—REM Smith—you saw this in Germany. The Germans took this demented tilt towards green environmentalism, and all that’s happened is that their electricity is five times as expensive as it should have been, and they pollute more—not least because they have to burn lignite. That’s how it’s turned out—lignite, for God’s sake, the most polluting form of coal!

They shut their nuclear power plants down, which was utterly insane. What’s happened in Germany is they’re more dependent on, like, Putin for example. Their energy costs have spiraled out of control; they’re de-industrializing as a consequence, and they pollute more. So, like, the only way that’s a victory is if all you wanted to do to begin with was cause as much havoc and disruption as possible.

It’s funny you should say that because one of my MLAs in the legislature—and just listening at what our opponents in the New Democratic Party have to say—he came up with this formula that the progressives have. They identify a problem, and then they identify a solution that will make things worse, and then they criticize conservatives who have solutions that are actually a lot more practical and may work and try to demonize the solutions that we take.

But you’re absolutely right: there’s this—you know, it’s plausible that the approach that they would take would work. It’s plausible that if you built out an economy based on nothing but wind and solar and batteries that everybody would have free electricity and it would drive prices down and it would be unlimited because the wind is always blowing somewhere and the sun is always shining somewhere, and if you just interconnect it enough, then it should work.

I think that plausible lie has been at the heart of why we’ve had such dysfunctional policy around how we develop our energy sector. You need to have reliable power—that should be number one. It shouldn’t— it should go without saying that a fuel source that only works 10% of the time in the case of sun in our market or 30% of the time in the case of wind is not something that you can power an industrialized economy on.

Then on top of that, if you try to add everything onto the power grid, so that all of your industrial use has to come from electricity, all your heating has to come from electricity, all your transportation has to come from electricity, at some point it gets absurd. It gets obvious that it is unachievable.

I think that there’s this aspirational approach they’ve put out there that people want it to be true. So they continue to endorse policies that are completely incapable; it’s impossible to implement them. It’s our job as conservatives to understand where that aspiration comes from because I think people are good-hearted. They actually want to have less impact on the planet; we all enjoy our beautiful outdoor spaces, and we want to make sure that we’re not doing anything that’s going to impact biodiversity.

So, I think there is a human need to be in touch with nature that they’re able to, I think, take advantage of to propose policies that simply won’t work. So we have to make sure we understand where that human motivation is coming from and say, “Look, we can achieve that a different way.” Then we have to propose what that different way is, and that’s what we’re trying to do in Alberta.

Well, there’s also a shadow side to that, just like there was a shadow side to the fossil fuel industry’s presumption that if they marketed themselves in a green way, that that would be a net economic advantage to them. That all presumes that the people that you’re contending with are playing a fair game, and I actually don’t believe that that’s the case with much of the environmental nonsense.

I feel that way, for example, when I go into a hotel and I see signs everywhere telling me that they’re only going to do laundry every two days because they’re saving the planet. And that isn’t why they’re not doing laundry; they’re not doing laundry because it saves money, and fair enough, but they can cover that with this claim of environmental virtue.

So many of the people who signal virtue on the environmental side—and this is particularly true in the political realm on the left—are doing that not because they care for the environment in the least, not if it came to actually making personal sacrifices for doing something about it. They want to be seen to be the saviors of the planet without doing any of the work, any of the background work, any of the research of the industrial innovation that would be necessary to carry it out.

They want to be seen as experts without noting, for example, “Well, how in the hell are you going to interconnect all the world’s power grids together? Where are you going to get the wire? Where are you going to get the metal? And isn’t it a problem not only that wind only works 10% of the time, but when it doesn’t work, you have to have a parallel energy system in place? And if that's not nuclear, it has to be fossil fuels.”

Then, instead of having just a fossil fuel grid, let’s say for the electrical electrified economy, you have to have a wind and a solar grid plus a fossil fuel grid. Well, how in the world could anyone with any sense whatsoever think that that constituted an improvement, especially when you also decide, let's say, to take nuclear out of the equation, which is the last thing you’d do if you actually cared about carbon dioxide production?

For me, it’s mostly—it’s not even there is an element of care with regards to environmental sustainability, but there's a much larger element of being seen, to be seen praying in public, to put it bluntly, to be seen virtue signaling with no effort.

So, the NDP in particular are good at that, but it’s interesting: I don’t just blame the environmentalists, and I don’t just blame the politicians. I do have to blame the companies themselves and the industry. Michael Shellenberger, once again, did an assessment of how did nuclear get demonized the way it did, and I think he traced it to some proponents in the natural gas and traditional fuel industry that demonized nuclear.

Well, then, of course, wind and solar come along, and now they’re the ones demonizing coal and oil. Now we’re in a position where, because they’re trying to virtue signal, get a market advantage, I’m not sure—now we have a situation where virtually none of our fuel sources are considered to be green enough.

Nuclear has, of course, the issues of how you deal with the waste. Wind and solar—I think I may have made this point with you before, I’m sorry—like as long as we’re taking coal and turning it into solar panels, that is not a zero-emissions product. As long as you’re needing to use coal to create the steel that goes into the wind turbines, that is not a zero-emissions product either.

If you want to start saying, “I’m greener than you,” you have to look at the entire supply chain, and now we’re in a point where there is no answer. The fuel that might have been the goal—if the goal is de-growth, de-industrialization, and population reduction, then the demonization of all industrial fuel sources is perfectly in keeping with the underlying ethos of the radical types, and that is what’s been driving this, as you rightly pointed out, since the early 1960s.

I wonder if they’ve gone a step too far now, though, on attacking agriculture. Because they’ve been waiting to do this and I’ve been watching this for some time. I’ve been giving speeches for years telling our beef farmers, as well as our food producers, that they started with a campaign against coal; they shifted to a campaign against fracking; they shifted again to a campaign against oil sands; and now they’re shifting again to food production.

They were very delighted after COP28 to say, “Oh good, we finally got food on the table,” and I remember reading an article from an extreme environmental website decrying the fact that 80% of food production comes from fossil fuel energy. They need fossil fuels to be able to operate their equipment and get the grain to market and do all the transportation.

But when you look at it, when you attack our food producers, it dramatically backfires. Look what happened in the Netherlands. Denmark, I have just read, is now putting a tax on belching and flatulating cattle—a $100 carbon tax on cows—and you have to wonder, at what point are people going to say enough is enough?

Because I’ll have to tell you, like the next logical step is if belching and farting and breathing is now a sin, how long before they start putting a carbon tax on human beings? Because guess what? We’re all belching, farting, and breathing creatures as well.

I think they may have overplayed their hand in going after our food producers. Our food producers are some of our most high esteemed industries and professionals in any economy, certainly far above lawyers, car salespeople, and politicians. To go after our food producers in this way doesn’t make sense, especially since the entire practice of food production is understanding the carbon cycle. That when you have a grain that you’re producing, you have to capture CO2 from the air; it goes into the head of that grain, people eat it, and then it gets recycled again.

The entire process of food production works with the carbon cycle, and for them to be attacking the very nature of food production and how the carbon cycle works, I think they’ve gone too far.

I think it’s one thing to apply this weird paradigm on industry; I just don’t think they can carry it over to food production without having the kind of outcomes that we’re seeing around the world, where farmers are pushing back, and people are pushing back.

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Yeah, well, we can certainly hope that’s true.

Okay, let’s turn our attention, if you don’t mind, back to Canada for a moment. When I was a kid, teenager, Pierre Trudeau—the elder Trudeau—brought in the National Energy Policy and devastated the Western economy. That was a massive overreach of federal power and an invasion by the feds into a domain that wasn’t constitutionally theirs. Things went very sideways in the west as a consequence.

Now, here we are, 40 years later, and we have his son in office, who is, if anything, as narcissistic and less competent than he was. We have what’s essentially a schism in the Canadian structure. Here’s one issue, for example: I found out recently that Quebec has enough natural gas to supply its own needs for 200 years or the EU for 50, given known reserves. The Quebecois have decided that they are not going to utilize that resource, even though they sold the rights to its development to someone whom they later turned their back on.

That’s fun! At the same time, they’re receiving massive transfer payments from Alberta and demonizing the Alberta economy as the producer of the very wealth upon which they’re dependent. That doesn’t seem particularly sustainable to me. So, I’m curious: how do you contemplate—I know there’s going to be an election in the year, and probably Trudeau and his minions are going to vanish into the haze, with any luck—but how do you envision a relationship in a continuing Canada given the mass split between, let's say, the interests of the West and the apparent interests of consumers and governments alike in central Canada and particularly in Quebec?

So, on the optimistic side, what do you see as the way forward?

Well, if I was to express a preference for Pierre Trudeau's approach versus Justin Trudeau’s approach, I actually preferred the Pierre Trudeau way because he just wanted to steal our wealth. He didn’t want to destroy it. This Trudeau, the younger, actually wants to destroy our wealth, and I can’t imagine how he thinks that that’s good for the entire country because Alberta, as you rightly point out, is a major contributor—not only to the prosperity of our own province, but because so much of the corporate tax revenue and personal income tax revenue and sales tax revenue goes to Ottawa. They are a massive beneficiary of the fact that we have a strong and growing economy.

So my way of dealing with that is to just point out they don’t really have a mandate to govern in any meaningful sense. He only got 32% of the vote in the last election; he had a partnership with the NDP, which I see: Jagmeet Singh spends almost as much time criticizing Justin Trudeau as I do, and yet he continues to prop—he’s the worst hypocrite in Canadian politics ever, I think. And people are seeing it because look at the result that just happened in Toronto, where a historically liberal riding not only did the Liberals lose ground, but the NDP lost ground as well. Both are seeing, I mean, the public is seeing that they are one and the same in the kind of damage that they’re causing to our economy.

Now, talking about Quebec, every time I see my colleague, Premier Legault, I remind him that he has the ability to solve his own energy problems. It’s going to get to a crucial point in Quebec, and I’m quite interested to see how it plays out. You may recall that Quebec signed a very favorable deal for the Churchill Falls hydroelectric power, which is located in Newfoundland-Labrador—a 70-year deal that has the value that they pay going down over time. If you can even imagine, I think they’re only paying a fraction of a cent right now for access to that power.

The problem is that deal runs out in 18 years, and we’re already beginning to see the impact that it’s having on their market that they can’t offer 20-year power purchase agreements to new industrial installations because they don’t own the right past 18 years. They’re now going to be at a point where their energy export—as I’ve seen, National Bank just did a study on this—where their energy exports are going to fall off. Their energy exports have been part of the reason why they’ve been able to continue to not only get money from Western Canada but also have the ability to subsidize their own population.

So, the model is falling apart in Quebec, and the solution is very obvious. It is not to build more hydroelectric plants; we’ve now seen that hydroelectric can take even longer to build than a pipeline in our country. In British Columbia, Site C began in 1954, and it took decades before they finally got to a point where they could build it, and now it’s massively over budget for the amount of megawatts that are coming on stream.

So that isn’t going to be a solution in Quebec. The solution is the one that we’re pursuing—natural gas. I call it a destination fuel, not just a transition fuel. It’s both, but even if you use the language from the agreement that came out of the COP meeting last year, they talk about how important natural gas is as a transition to whatever comes next.

I will put it to Quebec every time I see them that that’s what they should be focused on. How do you use the technology that we have already developed to be able to capture CO2, maybe put it to a useful purpose, develop out your hydrogen economy, and perhaps an ammonia economy? They have the ability to solve this problem themselves, but they have become so invested in a negative approach to how we talk about traditional resources or fossil fuels.

I don’t know if they'll be able to have that conversion. I’ll be watching to see, but they’re very power-constrained now. They’re just not going to be able to grow their economy unless they figure out how to bring in a secure supply and an affordable supply of electricity.

It might change the country, you know? It might change the country for Quebec to become more pragmatic. I can imagine a world that would be very, very different if Premier Legault were to say, “You know what, we are going to develop our resources for the benefit of the Quebec people.” He’s always been very effective at saying that. If he framed it that way—not only can we help the Quebec people bring our prices down, but then we can also help our friends in Europe by being able to export this product to them so that they don’t have to rely on rogue regimes in order to meet that demand.

There’s such a strong argument to be made, but it’s going to be up to Quebec and their own language and their leaders to have the courage to make that argument.

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Right, okay, okay, so now let me ask you, if you don’t mind, I’m curious, I guess on the personal side, how do you manage your relations with the people who are in power in Ottawa? I mean, you guys are so much in opposition with regards to everything I can possibly think of. It’s a very strange situation for a country to be in—particularly Alberta—because Alberta is at the center of this, but it seems to me that it’s the West in its entirety—insofar as it’s got its head clear.

I know British Columbia tends to be a very odd place politically, but the other three Prairie Provinces—everything the federal government does is antithetical to their economic future. How do you manage that, professionally and personally, given that, well, as you said, we have a situation where our prime minister is really the enemy of our economic engine fundamentally?

Really, fundamentally, it’s perhaps, you know, I suspect that he believes that his legacy—and you alluded to this—his legacy is something like planetary savior of the environment with Canada as the shining example, right? It’s something like that, and I don’t know, maybe he has an eye to some unicure after he destroys the liberal government and brings its party to its knees, and so he’s playing an internationalist game.

He obviously seems much more interested in that, so like I don’t understand exactly how you manage this practically. It is—I find an intermediary, and my intermediary right now is Francois-Philippe Champagne, who actually really is a great booster of all things Canada. He cares about investment, he cares about job creation, and he’s been able to find ways to support projects that have taken place in our province just as enthusiastically as he supports projects in Quebec and Ontario, so there’s that.

There’s also this strange dichotomy that we have a prime minister who’s been in power for nine years, and we did actually see two pipelines to the coast get built under this prime minister. So, Trans Mountain pipeline is just open, and it’s changed everything for our markets for our B.C. bitumen product, and Coastal GasLink is completed, and we’re just waiting for the commissioning of LNG Canada to be the first project that will allow us to export LNG, and that’ll change our natural gas markets as well.

So, I have a hard time understanding that, on the one hand, there must be enough pragmatic voices within his cabinet to move those kinds of major projects forward, even though they’re massively over budget, even though it takes much longer than it should, even though it’s tied up in red tape and permitting rules. Somehow, those two projects managed to get completed.

So it’s up to us to try to find a pathway; we try to find the areas where we can agree, partner on those areas, and then just hope that they don’t do more damage in the time that they have between now and the next election. The thing that worries me is I see an acceleration of Steven Guibault, our Environment Minister; I see an acceleration of him trying to push forward with as many of these extreme policies as he possibly can before that deadline ends up getting met.

I don’t know if they’re going for broke, if they just think, “Well, we’re going to lose anyway, so we may as well get all of this on the table because it will take years to undo,” or if they honestly think that making energy and food more expensive for all Canadians is somehow a winning strategy. I mean, against everything else that they must be seeing in the environment, they’re plummeting poll results, the plummeting results of the NDP.

The fact that they continue to forge ahead—it's a bit of a mystery to me. It would seem at some point they’ve got to clue in that what we’re doing is making life more unaffordable for Canadians; it's reducing productivity, which is reducing take-home pay; it’s making people feel more impoverished. This is going to impact our poll results, and yet they haven't managed to draw that connection yet.

No, look, it’s something I think there’s a combination of things. The first is that every sacrifice is worthwhile if you’re hypothetically saving the planet. The psychological benefits of patting yourself on the back for doing that—in spite, maybe even of your own self-interest—are not to be underestimated; it’s a serious psychological motivation. It’s fundamentally something approximating the return of nature worship, and I really mean that, right? All the way down to the bottom, because whatever the planet is, whatever the environment is—these vague terms take absolute priority over everything else, and that’s essentially a religious endeavor.

And then I would also say, because I do believe that we have no shortage of narcissists among the leadership of our federal government, that as the prime minister becomes increasingly unpopular—which was part of his goal, was to be the golden boy, to be the popular man—as a wounded narcissist, he will have no shortage of reason to take revenge.

If you can add to that the “do or die” mentality of the die-hard green environmentalists—like Guibault—they’re going to be slotting in every conniving bit of wording they can possibly manage between here and next October. And they’ll be feeling very morally virtuous for doing it. It’s like, “Well, even though everyone’s against us, we’re still holding the course.” You can see that with Freeland’s response to Trudeau's loss in Toronto.

I mean, they should be clamoring for his head; I guess we’ll see how that unfolds, because it does sound like some voices are. I get—I guess I just like the old style of liberal, the ones that actually led with their heart and compassion. We used to have a liberal party that talked about the single mom and the difficult time that she’s having being able to pay for groceries and take her kids to soccer practice.

We used to care—they used to care about the tradesman who’s lost his job because of whatever downturn has happened or whatever consolidation has happened because of these additional regulations. They used to care about the average family just trying to make ends meet, and I don’t hear them talking that way anymore.

That’s the thing that surprises me the most: where did all of that heart go? Where did all that compassion go? Those are the things that POI is talking about right now. I hear Pierre talking more about the plight of regular people and the difficulties they’re having making ends meet. I know that that is very much on my mind about how do we counteract all these terrible policies so that people can just afford the basics of life.

I don’t know when the Liberals stopped caring, but it’s so obvious that what you described is true—that they’re not putting people first anymore.

Yeah, well, it is very interesting to see while Ford has done the same thing in Ontario. Ford and POI have really become the voice of the working class. I see the thing. You kind of see that with Trump in the US too, and I think it may be because we’ve actually developed the realization on the classic liberal and conservative front that there is no better pathway forward for rectifying the economic misery of the poor than the free market system.

To the degree that that’s the case—and now I think the case for that is unassailable unless you’re criminally, literally blind—that it’s easy now for conservatives, who used to be the party of big business, let’s say, which is kind of what they were when I was a young guy, to be speaking directly to the working class. “We’re going to declutter the system; we’re going to get rid of the idiot environmental taxes that do nothing but make your life more difficult and increase pollution, and we’re going to serve you.”

I think POI has done that very effectively. Now, can you envision—how do you feel about the unity, let's say, of the conservative movement in Canada? Now there are a number of conservative premiers who seem to be ideologically on board with your approach. There’s Scott Moe and Blaine Higgs, at minimum. And I don’t know what your relationship is like with Doug Ford. Then we have POI, of course, who’s a rising star and is very much likely to be the next prime minister.

What’s your view of Canada’s future at the moment? Optimistic, fundamentally? And if it’s optimistic, what is that optimism tempered by?

Let me just add one more preamble to that: I’m afraid that what’s going to happen is that the Canadian economy is far worse than people think and that we’re going to discover a lot of things under the carpet that were hidden by the Trudeau government. Now, the evidence of that is he has a scandal every week that should be sufficient to bring down his government.

Like the last scandal we just had about the airlifting of the Sikh people out of Afghanistan—it’s one a week! So we’re going to see a lot of things that we don’t know about the second Pierre POI is elected, and they’re going to be instantly blamed on him by the environmentalists and the greens. Then he’s going to have maybe four years to mop up what is one god-awful mess.

You know, I could see a scenario where he’s in for four years. All those Canadians who have to remortgage—which I believe is about 60% of them—are going to do that and lose their houses. It’s going to be really a rough go for him, and then the Liberals are replacing. So now, you know, that’s a pessimistic view, and I’m not saying that will happen. But man, it isn’t obvious to me that I’d like to be in his shoes.

So, how are you conceptualizing, let’s say, the next five years in Canada? When’s your next election?

My next election is October of 2027, so I have a bit of runway. I’d make a point that you’ve touched on, and you’ve hit it. I talked to a young analyst who was looking and tracking Justin Trudeau's declining popularity, and he also is tracking the number of mortgage renewals that are happening each month.

It tracks perfectly. The more people who are having to renew their mortgage now face the sticker shock of having double the mortgage payment because of their high rates. Then they look around and say, “Who’s caused this?” The obvious answer is the guys who’ve been in charge for the last nine years.

Who's got a solution for it? The obvious answer is Pierre POI. That’s very linked to what it is that they’re experiencing, and it’s happening in real time and happening very quickly, and it will probably accelerate.

I would say that am I optimistic about conservatism? I would say that the conservatives—this new generation of conservative leaders, whether it’s Pierre or whether it’s my colleagues across the country—we’ve begun to realize that aspirationally, the blue-collar workers and those trades unions are more aligned with our conservative values than they are with the extreme green alignment that we’re seeing under the Liberals, the Green Party, and the Socialists, the New Democrats.

If I was a frontline worker, I would say, “Why in the world would I support any of those parties?” Because all they’re doing is advocating for job losses. They don’t want to see these high-paying resource jobs be successful. They haven’t invested in raising the parity of esteem for the skilled trades and professions the way we talk about it in the conservative movement.

Part of the reason that we do is that we’ve seen the pathway that kids were told: “Kids were told, well, graduate from high school, go to university, get a bachelor’s degree, and then after that, get a master’s, and then after that get a Ph.D. And then you will be the highest paid workers in society because the more education you have, the more you’re going to get paid.”

What has happened, in fact, though, is those kids who have gone down that pathway end up with one or $200,000 worth of student loan debt, and now they’re in their late 30s trying to get out of the workforce, and their degree isn’t valued as much as they were led to believe it was going to be.

Now they’re trying to get married and get a home, and now the home prices have escalated, and so now they have to put off having kids because they can’t afford to have kids, pay a mortgage, and pay off their student loan debt. But there’s another way: you can actually encourage kids who are practical and want to do something with their hands and want to do some meaningful work in the resource sector.

Go out, get dual credit in high school, maybe have a couple of years in a trades program, and you start working right away making 60 to—in some cases, these jobs are $200,000 a year. You become an immediate taxpayer; you pay off your debt; you have the ability to buy a home or build a home depending on the profession that you go into. Then, you can get married, you can have kids, you can buy your house, you can afford your life.

It's a different vision, and that’s why I think that we understand a lot more about how vitally important those high-paying resource jobs are. It’s not just about the economy; it’s about human flourishment. It’s about being able to live the life you want to live. Most of us just want to find our lifemate partner, be able to get married, be able to have kids, be able to take care of families, take vacations, and go camping—and do those kinds of things that when we look back to our own childhood seem to be getting further and further out of reach.

But I think that we’re linked. That’s why I think the approach that Doug Ford has taken and even in the approach in the United States where the Republicans realize that the frontline blue-collar workers have way more in common with the conservative side of the spectrum these days than the ideological side that we’re seeing in the extreme green movement that is influencing all the progressive parties.

So, I’ve been thinking about messaging on the conservative front for quite a while, and maybe that’s what we’ll talk about on The Daily Wire side, at least to some degree.

You know, I’m going to go down into the bottom of things for a moment. I’ve been writing a book recently on the stories of the Old Testament, and partly because I think that what’s at the basis of the current culture war that besets us is actually a religious battle, fundamentally. It’s a battle of first principles, and that’s what a religious warrior is: it’s a battle of first principles.

There’s a very interesting representation of the Divine in the Old Testament—in particular, in the Old Testament—and God is portrayed in the Old Testament as something like the dynamic between conscience and calling. You see the voice of conscience emerge in the story of Elijah, for example, who’s a prophet that appears with Christ when he’s transfigured on the mount. You see the idea of calling in the story of Abraham, who called to the adventure of his life, and also in the story of Moses, who’s spoken to by the spirit of the burning bush before he becomes a leader.

There’s this dynamic, and it’s an interesting dynamic because it maps onto the political domain almost perfectly. So conservatives are conscientious, and liberals are open. Open people are creative and entrepreneurial; they invite and conscientious people draw the lines, they draw the borders.

Now, the problem for the conservative types who are conscientious is that it’s much easier to appeal to young people with a vision, and conservatives are very bad at propagating a vision to young people. That void has been filled by the environmentalists on the leftist side because they offer young people an easy pathway to moral virtue and to sort of planetary messianism, right?

It’s like ally yourself with the marginal, celebrate the environment, and your work is done, right? And which is a really appalling thing to teach young people because their work hasn’t even begun. But it is an easy out, whereas the conservatives are always saying, “No, don’t do this, don’t do that, don’t do this, don’t do that.”

That is the voice of conscience, but you touched on the possibility for the conservatives to offer something that’s much more in keeping with the vision, and at minimum, that’s the pleasures and responsibilities of the typical upward striving middle-class life—that’s characterized the American dream.

It’s like, that’s not so bad. Graduate, find something useful to do, become an apprentice, let’s say, so that you can actually make some money, find yourself a long-term stable monogamous partner, have some children, right? At minimum, you’ve got a life going there—the basics of a life.

If you can add some additional adventure on top of that, so much the better, you know? Danielle, one of the things I’ve really noticed in my tours now—I’ve probably spoken to 800 cities now, something like that, over the last six years—there’s something very interesting that always happens in my lectures when I discuss a certain topic.

I’ve been able to draw a line between the idea of responsibility—which is a very conservative idea—and the idea of adventure—which is a much more entrepreneurial and liberal idea. One of the things I’ve learned is that the oldest stories that we possess make responsibility and adventure equivalent; they’re the same thing.

Whenever I point that out to my audiences, they go silent. That’s invariably the case. I’ve literally watched that—who knows how many hundreds of times? Many, and I've made a point of observing it because it’s so striking. So you can tell people, “Look, if you look at your life and you're trying to come to terms with your conscience, you're trying to decide whether you’ve lived a life worth living, and you review your progress forward, you will invariably conclude that those times that you stepped out of your way to adopt excess responsibility were the times that you were at your best.”

No one’s told young people that since like 1962. That's a long time, and conservatives have that right at their fingertips, right? They can say, “Look, what we have are fun—the fundamental building blocks of Western society—with all of the freedom that that produces that enables you to take the responsibility for your life in this subsidiary manner that the Catholic social theorists talk about. Take on that responsibility because it makes you noble; it makes you adventurous; it gives your life meaning, right?

You’re living for other people then and for the future, and not for your narrow present-centered self, which is what the left is always selling—you know, in this prideful hedonism that’s so much part of their marketing. Now, if the conservatives don’t have anything to offer other than “no” in the face of that, they’re going to lose, especially among young people.

But if they tell them “Look, take some responsibility, have your adventure,” the young people think, “Oh, that’s the pathway, is it?” And so, I think that’s part of what’s driving way down deep that emerging alliance between the working class and the conservatives. The working class knows this, even if it’s not particularly well articulated: you know, the American dream is predicated on the idea that if you make the proper sacrifices, your children can thrive.

That’s true if the state is functioning properly. It’s like the hallmark of a properly functioning state. So, you know, I can see reason for optimism on the conservative side if the conservatives can learn to be invitational, you know, and to say, “Look, we actually have a better path; it’s not merely that we're forbidding you or that we're burdening you with duty.”

Which, I can understand that, but you could have both. You could have both because the left has left both on the table.

I think you’re right about that. The essence of what I was struck by—Bill Maher, who has not really been a friend to conservatives, but in talking about some of these issues, he said, “The progressives are the ones who put their foot on the gas and the conservatives are the ones who put their foot on the break.” He said, “You know what? On some of these issues, I think it’s time to put on the break.”

Like, I think we all want to see progress, but we don’t want to lose the things that are actually working in pursuit of some kind of future that’s unattainable. Whether that is some of the cancel culture that we’ve seen, some of the wokeism that we’ve seen, some of the extreme environmental rhetoric that we’ve seen, I think people are realizing that that’s kind of getting away from what it is that we’re all here for.

We’re all here to do—to self-actualize and be the best that we can be and find a partner so that we can help them be the best, and then as a team, you create a family and hopefully nurture children into adulthood so that they can go on and do wonderful things.

If you can create a business because you are creative, that’s another aspect of conservatism. When you’re successful, you give back through philanthropic causes. I find it to be a far more human-centered and a far more supportive approach for basic humanity and all of our aspirations than what I’m seeing on the other side.

And I think that’s part of what maybe young people are searching for. I have such dismay at the lack of motivation that we see among the young people—the despair, the isolation, the loneliness, the mental health and addiction crisis that is at its foundation. It has got to be a spiritual malaise. People are missing something—missing connection.

If we can find a way to say, “This is the way that you reconnect,” we promote these things. We promote making a long-term bond with somebody. We promote family because it’s good for you as an individual; it’s good for society as a whole as well.

These are things that will make you happier in your old age. I had a chance to go to Brian Mulroney’s celebration of life. He was, of course, a prime minister back in the 1980s, and that was the reason I got involved in politics. I thought he had done a lot for our country. He brought down interest rates; he brought down inflation; he ended the national energy program; he brokered free trade—he’s got some big things he did right.

Some things he did wrong ended up costing him his time to be prime minister, but what was so beautiful was you opened up the page of the celebration of life, and it had his beautiful family, his wife who was at his side for their entire time together, beautiful kids—not to mention the next generation of grandkids. I think all of his kids have two or three kids each, and you just look at that picture and you say, “That’s his legacy.”

He did wonderful things for the country, absolutely, but I bet the most thing he was most proud of was the fact that he had that beautiful connection with a loving spouse and the supportive network of his family. He was able to create an environment where they all could do well. That, to me, is really inspirational.

If we can communicate that in a way that helps young people get some restored hope and creates a pathway for them to realize that they can have all of that, I think conservatism will be on the rise. I think we’re just beginning to find the language around that.

Maybe we took it for granted that parents would pass that on to kids, and GR kids, because there has been a bit of a break that’s happened. I don’t know if I fully understand exactly why we got so disconnected and isolated, but I think that’s what conservatism has fragmented families have something to do with it.

It doesn’t take very many generations of broken families before things go seriously sideways. So that’s something else that conservatives can promote and offer. They’ve done a particularly good job of that in Hungary with their family policies.

And so, I—and it is central, really. I mean, for people to have that level of happiness, if you have to have a spouse that if you’re not sure of a direction, you have somebody who acts as a sounding board. You can say, “No, you're on the right path,” and to be able to nurture young children and watch them grow—it’s there’s probably nothing more joyful.

So, I think that when we have gone in a direction now where you have family breakdown, fewer kids being born as well—but I think it’s also having these knock-on effects of creating more isolation and more despair, and I think that there is a way to turn it around.

You know, there’s another thing that’s emerged, and this is all relevant, I suppose, to the ongoing culture war. So, the sexual revolution, which was one of the driving forces that fragmented families, let’s say, promised an infinite wealth, let’s say, of spontaneous carnal delights, and that’s certainly a vision that’s being very much promoted by the radicals on the left.