Conservative Resistance in Canada | Roman Baber | EP 273

I think it's very important that history regards this episode fairly because Canadians, Americans, people all over the world in the free world have been subjected to unprecedented government tactics, right? The censorship, the segregation, the psychological manipulation. And if that narrative somehow prevails and it suggests that it saved lives, then we will never fully get our democracy back, and we will never fully go back to normal. Those are two propositions that I find unacceptable. We have to get our democracy back. We have to go back to normal.

Hello everyone, as you may or may not know and probably don't, Canada is in the midst of a leadership race for its federal Conservative Party. The federal Conservatives in Canada are generally the second most likely political party in Canada to govern at the federal and the provincial levels. Recently, as a consequence of the aftermath of the truckers' convoy, the Conservative Party blew up in some sense in Canada. The leader resigned, and a new slate of contenders is now vying for leadership position.

I spoke with one of them recently: Pierre Pauliev, who's currently the front runner, and I extended an invitation to the other candidates to speak with me. Mr. Roman Babber took me up on that. He's currently, as I said, a candidate for leadership of Canada's federal Conservative Party. He's a former member of Ontario's provincial parliament. He was removed, most infamously, by Ontario Premier Doug Ford from that provincial government caucus after calling out the collateral harm of lockdowns in January 2021.

Since then, Mr. Babber has been a staunch advocate in favor of a balanced COVID response, such emergency responses, and in particular against lockdowns due to their toll on the health and mental health of Canadians. Roman also brought legislation to cut MPP pay to Canadian Emergency Response Benefit levels while emergency orders are in place. He has commenced litigation against the Attorney General of Ontario over Canadians' right to protest and worship outdoors and recently put forward a bill to outlaw workplace mandates. He is running for leader of the Conservative Party of Canada because he does not wish to "sit back while Canadians are losing faith in Canada's democracy and Canadian opportunity."

Thank you very much, Mr. Babber, for coming to talk to me today, and I'm looking forward to a provocative discussion.

Good to be with you, Jordan. So let's start with a question that I thought was handled very badly by the Conservatives during the last federal debate. The debate was during the election that Trudeau precipitously called. The debate was framed around five issues, and one of the things I thought the Conservatives did extraordinarily badly was to allow the progressives essentially to dictate the terms of the debate, to dictate the topics.

So one of the things I wanted to ask you: you're contending for leadership of the Conservative Party and hypothetically for prime ministership of Canada. What do you think the most crucial issues facing Canadians today are?

I think, like in much of the western world, it's the erosion of Canada's democracy that I fear very much, and that propelled me to enter into this race. I'm seeing unprecedented erosion, whether it's by way of censorship. We have two or three pieces of legislation in Canada seeking to abridge freedom of speech. We have regulators coming down on membership. We have obviously social media giants also censoring speech.

Then, as many of you know, I have been very saddened by the fact that close to 20% of Canadians are treated as effectively second-class citizens. I made the choice that most Canadians have made, but that doesn't mean that we should impose our choice on others. In fact, we've never done that as western civilization. We're seeing an unlawful invocation of the Emergencies Act that was predicated on false propositions, voted on after the alleged emergency was over, clearly without meeting the matter of the law, which suggests that you don't need it if you have other legislation to deal with.

So, Jordan, I think that if you don't have democracy, you don't have anything. I'm very concerned about where we're headed.

So what makes you think that this concern is warranted? I mean, you're from the former Soviet Union, so if you have experience with such things, your family does certainly. You talked about censorship; we could go into that with Bill C-11 in particular, which is a stunningly overreaching piece of legislation, no matter how you slice it, and will be absolutely impossible to impose. What makes you think that we're actually facing something serious in Canada in relation to our democratic freedoms? And why should people assume that this isn't just a scandalous talking point that the Conservatives are using to drum up interest in the leadership race?

What do you see happening? As they would say in Latin, "Look, you said look at her. It speaks for itself." You see it before your very eyes. Government is passing legislation which would dictate, which would manipulate what Canadians see online, giving the CRTC, which is our broadcast regulator, even more power to determine what we may and may not see.

We see government also picking winners and losers in the media, and we know that we do not have effectively free and independent media in Canada because it's heavily subsidized. The government bailed out the media a couple of years ago and continues with annual subsidies. How can you have free and independent media when the media signs the government’s paycheck?

Yeah, well, let's drill that down a little bit. So the Canadian federal government subsidizes the CBC to the tune of between 1.2 and 1.5 billion dollars a year for a shrinking market of virtually no viewers. It then seems to also, in some sense, collude with the CBC to produce news pieces that are in keeping with government legislation and then to refer to those pieces of legislation to prove that the legislation being covered was actually necessary to begin with.

And then there's this broader pattern of subsidizing media in general, and to me, this is reminiscent of what's technically termed fascism, because fascism comes from "fascists" to bind together, and fascism is collusion of elites, right? So government, media, corporation colluding together to produce a kind of monolith. What would Pierre Pauliev have on my podcast when I interviewed him, famously or infamously said that he would defund the CBC. So what's your take on that from a policy perspective?

So it's important for viewers, as you mentioned, to understand I was born in the former Soviet Union, and we didn't leave until I was almost nine. I still have a very good recollection of that communist regime. Specifically, there was a newspaper called Pravda. Pravda means "truth" in the Russian language, and so Pravda would be plastered all over walls and buildings and subway stations, and it would essentially be government talking points.

What we've seen, particularly in the last two or three years, is that government was effectively repeating—sorry, media was effectively repeating government talking points, particularly as it came to the public health exercise. But I would say beyond that, so we don't only have this funding of the CBC, which I will end before lunchtime. We also have bailouts and subsidies of a number of other stakeholders in the media, and on top of that, we're now seeing an unprecedented move for media buys. Government has become one of the biggest advertisers on all news and media platforms, and there's an old rule in the ad game: he or she who pays for the ad gets their narrative across.

So I would not just defund the CBC; I will also end the bailouts and the subsidies, and I will limit the way that government is able to advertise on all platforms. You, I'm sure your viewers fully agree and understand that free and independent media is one of the most important checks and balances we have in our democracy because it is, in fact, vested with the responsibility to put a check on government, something we're simply not seeing in Canada, which I think in large part resulted in the catastrophe that I've alleged has transpired over the last two years.

Yeah, well, we had the continual suspension of Parliament in Canada, which is a catastrophe that's now being extended essentially another year in an absolutely unprecedented and unwarranted move. And so the possibility for genuine opposition to the Trudeau government's policies has been dramatically reduced on the parliamentary front, and now we have this situation where the press— and even the CBC in years past—was at least under some circumstances, what would you say, an effective critic of governmental policies, both federal and provincial, and also saw that as their sacred duty, let's say. That seems to have gone entirely by the wayside.

And so that means Canadians are in a position—I saw this with the truckers' convoy, you know, when Trudeau called them misogynists and bigots and that they were attempting, in some sense, to foment a coup. My sense of that was that Canadians had a really hard option in front of them, which was to either decide that their Prime Minister was a complete liar and that the federal government had become untrustworthy as an institution, along with all the legacy media outlets, or that the truckers were reprehensible misogynists and bigots. Many Canadians decided to take the latter stance, but it's not surprising to me because our institutions have been pretty sound for about 150 years, and it's a bitter pill for Canadians to swallow to understand that that, in some real sense, may no longer be the case.

You cannot underestimate the role that the media plays in everyday Canadian discourse. You said yourself at the commencement of this interview that Conservatives have difficulty reframing the debate. In fact, liberals framed the debate very, very well, and so it seems like we're fighting every election on their ground instead of talking about issues that may be important to us. And so there's no question that media has a large part in how the daily conversation goes on, which is why it's so important that we keep it independent and objective.

Back to the truckers, Jordan, everything the Trudeau government said about the Ottawa convoy turned out to be false. The arson was not connected; there were no weapons— that was a huge lie. There were no weapons found anywhere near the site. There was very little foreign funding, about 10 to 12%, and all of it was with small donations, and there was no foreign collusion. And it's on the strength of those misrepresentations that a lot of Canadians formed public opinion, and on the strength of those misrepresentations that the government tried to justify the invocation of the Emergencies Act, which is the successor of the War Measures Act that hasn't been invoked since the 70s.

And so this particular piece of legislation was a vote for the first time. This is, of course, an affront to democracy. But it's important how you stated that it was, in fact, the CBC that raised the prospect of foreign collusion, and one or two cabinet ministers pointed to evidence in the media in support of their suggestion that there was foreign collusion.

So the government is funding the media; the media is speculating and is often wrong; the government is predicating action on the basis of such media speculation and then justifies its invasive and very undemocratic action. So I think we're in real trouble here, and we've got to rethink all of this. While Trudeau, it seems to me, believes his own press releases in some real sense—and I'm not actually quite as cynical about that as I might be because I don't think it's possible to generate a web of deception around you, a web of instrumental deception around you, and simultaneously maintain your distance from that. So I think when he feeds stories to the CBC and then the CBC feeds them back, he believes it. It's not merely cynical; it's that he's trapped up in his own web of deception.

I think we've seen, last couple of years, one of the hallmarks of authoritarian regimes is that they peddle half-truths or things that are often not true, but quite often they tend to believe in the system that the people around them are made to buy into those half-truths because that essentially strengthens the system. We've seen that largely in our public health response. We've seen, for instance, that and even I'm talking about objective facts—facts that we understood pretty well—for instance, we knew that the modeling was not reliable. The modeling was consistently overly aggressive. They would meet some of the metrics, like cases, but we understood very early that the factor by which you have to multiply all the categories we're interested in, like hospitalizations or deaths, was constantly overstated.

But despite that, even though time and time again the modelers were wrong, the government continued to propagate this pervasive fear, this belief that we have to continue down this very aggressive path of mitigation that, of course, resulted in a catastrophe—well, in a catastrophe that hasn't ended yet because the fact that we disrupted supply chains— we're still gonna pay for that. And I was thinking the other day, too, you know, because we locked everything down around the whole world, that also meant that political leaders didn't get to meet face to face. And so, in some real sense, Putin, for example, was taken out of the face-to-face discussions that might have otherwise occurred for a period of a couple of years. And God only knows what that did to savage Russia-Western relationships.

So we—like the consequences of this lockdown have not, by any stretch of the imagination, come to an end yet. Now, you got tossed out of the Doug Ford Conservative provincial caucus because of your vociferous objection to the lockdown. So let's go into that for a bit. What happened there, and why did it come to blows, so to speak? And what's been the consequence of that for you, and what should Canadians think about that?

I started feeling a lot more optimistic about the risk of COVID early in May 2020. Public health came in and said, look, first of all, almost 80% of everyone that regretfully passed away were in long-term care homes and cognitive settings. I said, okay, that's of course tragic, so let's focus our resources on long-term care into infection protocol and control instead of locking down healthy people and making them sick. The second element we learned very early is that the virus was considerably more transmissible than we thought. And that was actually good news because that meant that there was the infection rate was considerably higher than previously thought, and that means that the metrics that we're worried about, like hospitalizations, like deaths, like mortality, is significantly lower.

And of course, I thought that we're going to potentially pivot our response because there's no question that locking down healthy people, delaying their surgeries, canceling cancer screenings, and of course locking down the economy is probably not going to be good for our health and mental health. And as time went on in 2020, I started hearing more and more of some of those unintended consequences of lockdowns. And so I had difficulty towards the end of 2020 to continue not being able to speak out on something that I felt defined our generation.

I worked very—it is well known that I worked very hard within my government to try and steer them into a different course, but in early January, I realized that we're probably not going to turn. All I wanted to do, Jordan, is to start a conversation because there was no conversation. People were afraid to tell their best friend that their kid is depressed because that would render you a grandma killer of some sort. And I was hoping that by issuing this public letter, a conversation would ensue. And, in fact, thankfully, it started. What I was also hoping for is that a lot more leaders would follow, a lot more business leaders, political leaders, union leaders, trade leaders, whoever—academic leaders—but unfortunately that did not happen much because of this culture of fear that has gagged everyone into silence.

And so since then, I've been asked to leave caucus. I lost my chairmanship of the justice committee, but I'm at peace with my decision, and I'm grateful that I've been able to give a voice to many Canadians.

Yeah, well, I mean Ford obviously piloted Ontario well enough, in the minds of the constituents, to win an overwhelming majority in the last election. And so he steered a course that seemed to be in accord with the desires of the people. Were you surprised? Now, I have been personally unhappy at least to some degree with the degree to which Mr. Ford has cozied up to the federal liberals. I’m also appalled at some of the legislation, for example, that his minister of education has proposed. I think that was Bill C-67, which is an absolutely appalling piece of legislation likely to die in ignominy. In any case, but that's not precisely the point.

What was your personal experience like trying to make the case that you made and then running into opposition from your former compatriots? It's interesting to note that, and of course, I will not reveal any names or details, and I will not breach confidentiality of my former caucus, but I will say that it's well known that many have in fact shared my view, including at times even the Premier himself. And it's regretful, and I found it incredibly regretful that we didn't have the courage—we didn't have the political courage to say enough. We have to reassess our response because we're clearly harming people. Right? If this was tax policy or if we were dealing with highway construction, then fine, I understand why some people might be more inclined to do politics than others. But when it comes to human life—and that's what I try to stress in this exercise—so subsequent to my expulsion from the Conservative caucus, I've been subjected to a lot of criticism, I would say pointedly, lightly, by our opposition, by media, and others.

Somehow there is this dispersion where people try to suggest that you don't care about life or that you want to compromise life. But I think it's precisely the opposite. It was an intent to save lives, and in fact, I think that this entire exercise of the last couple years dehumanized so many people around the world. In fact, as we try to convey this collective sense goal of safetyism, what we've in fact done is the opposite: we've compromised human life; we've compromised human ingenuity; we've regressed our children considerably.

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That's goodranchers.com/peterson. So I have it on good authority that a lot of the decision-making around COVID policy, specifically in Ontario but also at the federal level, was not based on so-called following the science—which is not an easy thing to do in any case—but on continually conducted opinion polls. And that's problematic to me for two reasons. Number one, as a psychologist and a research psychologist, I know perfectly well that asking people questions to find out what they really think is unbelievably difficult. And so the way you formulate the question to a large part determines the response you're going to get.

So, for example, when Trudeau clamped down on the truckers, the polls indicated that most Canadians supported his decision, but at the same time, the polls indicated that his popularity had plummeted. So what in the world are you supposed to make of that if you're polling? If you're a political leader and your guidance is polls, first of all, you're relying on something that's unbelievably unreliable: short-term sampling of public whim done badly by people who don't have the psychological credibility to answer the questions properly. And then, as you said, you have a proclivity to forego your principles.

Now, I know that the Doug Ford government, as well as the federal liberals, was relying on poll data to make their decisions. And so you said even the Premier agreed with you, at least in private, in relationship to the appalling consequences of the lockdowns and the abdication of political responsibility to healthcare experts. So why didn't they have the courage of their convictions?

Politics—politics is, as I often say, but it's stupid politics, right? Because there's no indication that following the polls in that matter actually constitutes a reasonable way forward. So politics is the rot on government. It's the cause of almost everything that's bad with government, and I hope that we get to get into that in a moment.

But back to opinion polling for a moment. What's important to appreciate is that a lot of that opinion is also shaped by government itself and media.

Well, of course. What we saw during the COVID pandemic was a vicious cycle in that you had public health come out, of course, the media would pick up on that and spread fear. The public would react with fear. The government would feel that intuitively and would act in response to that fear, even when it was completely unwarranted. And it was objectively unwarranted. And then in order to justify its own decision subsequent to the fact, the government would add more fear to justify its action, and so on it went.

You know, this is exactly why we don't have a direct democracy; we have a parliamentary democracy. So there's a bit of a space put in between government policy and public feedback and response because I think the reliance on opinion polls as a replacement for parliament does inevitably, especially in social media-mediated times with the acceleration of communication, produce these kinds of vicious circle, vicious cycle feedback loops that you just described.

When you don't have objective media questioning the government, right? Because the only thing we've heard over the course of this pandemic is, "Are you doing enough? Are you doing it fast enough? Are you saving enough lives? Why haven't you acted sooner?" And so on and so forth. Instead of asking "Is any of this effective? Is any of this making sense? Are you factoring in the collateral harm of what you're doing?" That was never asked, right? Which is the job—that's the fundamental job of politicians right there, because they abdicated their responsibility to these public health experts and decided that the narrow targets that you described trumped every other political and economic consideration in the short, medium, and long term.

This is an absolute abdication of political and legislative responsibility in the face of what turned out to be not so overwhelming threat and a collapse of our institutions as a consequence. The obligation of responsibility was to their constituents, was to the people that put them in office. And I've said before: anyone with a working cell phone would have understood the mental health catastrophe, of course, the economic catastrophe, the collapse of healthcare. I think one of the greatest legacies of our pandemic response is going to be the collapse of healthcare in Canada, and we're seeing that to some extent around the world.

We have a trauma—we have a post-trauma in the workforce—and that includes healthcare. We see that we have a lot of conditions that went undiagnosed that are now catching up with us. We're diagnosing cancer a lot later than we should be. But what they have done, what the political class has done effectively, is they've abdicated their responsibility to their constituents.

And why did they do that? For politics. They were afraid that they're going to be canceled by the radical COVID—I call it the COVID mob—that would cancel them on Twitter, that would dehumanize them or say that they don't care about lives, right? And that's what effectively they tried to do to me. A lot of politicians figure that they may be asked to leave their own government caucuses or caucuses if they went against the grain. And therein lies the classical agency conflict of politics, that it's inevitable, regretfully, that politicians continue to put themselves and their offices and their careers and their aspirations ahead of what's right for their constituents. And nowhere it has been true before I think to the extent that it has been with our COVID response.

So did this—the fact that you did get mobbed and excluded, let's say—did that shake your faith in, well, in—you said it didn't shake your faith in what you had to say. What did it do to your opinions of your political colleagues and to your sense of the functionality of the political process in general in Canada?

Look, thankfully, I've been able to survive, as I call it, the COVID mob, and I've continued to work ever since articulating sensible, moderate propositions that if people want to, for instance, avail themselves of the benefit that the vaccine offers, then they're certainly welcome to do so. But that doesn't mean that they should force anyone else to do anything that they don't want to do. We've just never done that before as Western civilization. You can acknowledge that the virus can be very, very risky to certain demographics, but you can also be reasonable and say, look, it's not about how many people get COVID; it's about who gets COVID, because we all have different risk dispositions.

And so that's what's missing: is that we could have overcome this public health emergency probably in a much better way if we just allowed for some sensible conversation, which we haven't. And so I'm grateful for the fact that I've been able to continue to speak on behalf of millions of Canadians. And that, I think in part, has brought me to today in that I feel that we need to have the courage as the Conservative Party to say what we believe and do what we believe is right.

How do you think Canadians—okay, so the Conservatives I've talked to in Canada over the last 10 years, they do have this terror of the mob. You know, each of them privately is afraid that they'll be targeted, as you were, by the woke mob and taken out, and that they'll be abandoned by their colleagues in doing so. And that has put Conservatives to say—it’s put them on the defensive, is to say almost nothing. It's put them unbelievably on the defensive.

Why, in the world, did they decide—first of all, how do you think Conservatives might be able to protect themselves against that? And second, why in the world did Ford and his people think that the right approach to take to you was to, like, dispense with you, in some sense? Why couldn't your conversation, your objections, be part of the ongoing conversation? Why did they have to take such a drastic move?

Look, to Conservatives, that fear—speaking their minds—they need to do some self-reflection and determine why they got into this business, right? And what is it that differentiated us traditionally from the Liberal Party is that we stuck to the principle of principles. We never sought popularity; we never sought to be populist and appeal to the most common denominator. Instead, we sought to implement sensible policy.

And so if the goal is to say what's popular and win elections, then we lost the heart and soul of the Conservative Party. We do not deserve—we have not earned the vote of Canadians. So they need to think about why they got into this business and do some self-reflection.

The second element of that is that those that are determined to do right by their constituents and to do right by Canadians—leadership needs to give them cover. They need to know that they are free to speak their mind and do the right thing without suffering reprisal. And you can't restore democracy in our country without restoring parliamentary democracy as well.

It's something that I'm very passionate about. I often say, look, I don't work for the boss; I work for constituents. And that's what I'll expect should I win the leadership of my caucus as well. I'm not going to penalize an MP for introducing legislation—that's their parliamentary right—even if I’ll vote against it. I'm not going to punish them for disagreeing with me because they’re not expected to parody me; they’re expected to serve the people that elected them. Otherwise, what do you even need parliament for? They could just vote by proxy, or just increasingly we don't need parliament, right? I mean, our federal government is doing everything it possibly can to make parliament merely an unnecessary impediment to their woke utopian future.

Well, and we're headed down that road very rapidly. Well, that is a disaster, and so parliamentary democracy, it also—it's important to understand that it spills to other institutions, right? You have a lot of close cooperation with industry, and you have to have close cooperation with regulators.

And so if the people around start sensing that there is no more dissent that is allowed— and that's, in fact, what in part I think contributed very much to the prevailing COVID response in that people in positions to disagree and affect a different outcome, like the colleges of physicians, like the colleges of nurses, like the teachers—just decided that, no, we're going to stick to the messaging, and we're not going to allow for any dissent.

I'm of the view that if regulated health professionals were able to freely articulate their view and concerns over the last couple of years, we would have been out of this mess.

Yeah, well, that's gone completely out the window. So what's happened among the—for healthcare professionals, speaking as one, is that the colleges have become weaponized. And so anyone who has a dissenting voice of any sort—medically, on the nursing front, social workers, psychologists—if they dare voice a dissenting opinion, the college will come down on them hard.

The college is the professional body that regulates, independently in some sense of the government, regulates these professions. Anyone in the world can take out a complaint against me, for example, as a psychologist, for any reason whatsoever, because of something I said, and the college will launch an investigation that tangles me up in six months' worth of legal trouble and substantive expense.

I've had multiple conversations with the regulated health professionals that wanted to speak out but did not have the courage to do so because they faced those professional repercussions. But it's important in this discussion not to lose sight of the fact that discussion and expression is not just important for democracy; it's also very important for public policy, right?

How can we make informed decisions when our field of opinions is limited? Don't you want a greater baseline of opinions so you can consider, so you can weigh your options, informed options, and then come to some sort of consensus as to what's reasonable? But when you have silence, when you don't have opinion, you inevitably have blind spots—intentionally or unintentionally.

So it's not just bad for democracy; it's terrible for public policy, right?

Right? Well, that was also less. We need to remember that one of the major points of parliament was to flesh out the ideas across a broad range of political ideas in as broad a manner as possible to make policy more subtle and nuanced and targeted and appropriate. It's just part of the process of thinking it.

And it's true not just for politics. It's true for business. If you're coaching a sports team, it's true for academia. Any good manager will tell you that the best thing they can do for their business is probably to surround themselves with folks that might disagree with them from time to time. And so I don't know why we resent that in government.

This uniformity of message—well, Trudeau told us why when he told us that he admired the Chinese Communist Party for their efficiency and decision-making capacity in relation to such things as environmental policy. Why bother with all that messy process of consultation and thought when you already have the answers handed down on high and all you need to do is implement them as quickly as possible?

It's interesting because that moment I think defined him very much, and we're seeing that hubris, that arrogance— almost there is a thuggish approach to others that we're seeing displayed from the Prime Minister, which is why he's now—he has no—I don't know if Canadians have any idea at all what a devastating hit the international reputation of our country has taken.

All of the Eastern Europeans I met—a lot of Eastern European politicians in my last tour through Eastern Europe—and they are utterly appalled by what's happened in Canada. And then in the United States, even among the Democrats in the United States, the fact that Trudeau dared to suggest that American Republicans financed what was essentially an insurrection attempt on Canada's capital is something so jaw-dropping, like I said, even to the leftists in the U.S., the liberals and the leftists—that it's appalling and absurd nature can hardly be overstated.

And then I'm thinking, too, from a strategic perspective, although I don't think he ever does think strategically, it's obvious to anyone with eyes that the Democrats are going to get absolutely lambasted in November, and that means that—and then probably in the next presidential election as well. And so in all likelihood, Canada is facing a conservative Republican-dominated monolith in the United States on the governmental front for the next four or five years after Biden departs.

And that means that Trudeau essentially alienated the biggest ally that Canada has by accusing those very same people of fomenting, of all the absurd things, an anti-democratic insurrection in Canada. It just boggles the mind. And then for him to have frozen bank accounts as part of the Emergencies Act? I don't think—I talked to anyone in the entire world over the last four months who thought that that was anything approximating a justifiable—no, let's not say justifiable—anything other than an absolutely catastrophic decision. It shook everyone's faith in the foundations of both Canadian democracy and the Canadian financial system.

My first—when I first started practicing law out of law school, I practiced commercial litigation primarily, and so I was on the receiving end of freezing bank accounts and I froze a number of accounts. And it's so difficult to do so in Canada or the United States. You have to meet a very high evidentiary threshold to ask the court to freeze a bank account.

And here, essentially, bank accounts of Canadians were frozen on a phone call, right? And with no trials, no trial, no hearing, for something that was made retroactively—arguably unlawful, right? It was retroactively unlawful, and it wasn't just bad for our democracy; it was terrible for investor confidence. We know that there was a very material risk of a run on the bank, and it's not clear that any of that, in any circumstance, was warranted.

But I want to make an interesting point. Further to you suggesting that there are Eastern European parliamentarians that doubt whether Canada is a democracy anymore, you're correct. Generally, I think that our reputation around the world has suffered immensely. And so my view on foreign affairs is we don't have the credibility to opine on world events anymore until we fix our democracy at home, which is what my run for the Conservative leadership is predicated on.

But it's also Eastern European Canadians—not just them, but I'd like to joke that if you're from an Eastern European block, and myself included, you have been very nervous about what you've been seeing for the last couple of years. And what really scares me—and I'm often asked, do I see any similarities between what I'm seeing in Canada today and what I saw in the Soviet Union as a kid? And I'd say, you know, jokingly, sure. I mean, the lineups to the liquor store—that's always a classic, that's a classic.

But beyond that, it's when government engages in remarkable activity that is predicated on a false narrative. When it does extraordinary things, very onerous, high-handed, running roughshod over people knowing that the pretense for such action, the narrative for such, is false. That's indicative of those authoritarian regimes. And as I said to you, we kept treating the virus as if this was still March or April 2020, as if we didn't learn anything—would continue this onerous response on a false narrative. And that's probably what scares me most because, Jordan, if government can engage in remarkable action on a false narrative, then it can do essentially whatever it wants for as long as it wants.

Yeah, well, it's going to do—the Trudeau government is going to do exactly the same thing on the environmental front, and there's absolutely no doubt about that. And they're going to ride this idiot, quasi-communist, anti-capitalist ethos that they're pushing like mad to the ultimate degree. We've already seen most recently this week some of the consequences of that unfolding—similar actions, let's say, unfolding in Holland, where the farmers—although they haven't gotten much media coverage, surprise, surprise—are doing in Holland something, or in the Netherlands, something very similar to what the truckers did in Canada, right?

So the Dutch government has made it very difficult for farmers to ply their trade because all they're doing, after all, is growing food. And who's going to need that, let's say, come fall when there's a terrible shortage? And so we're seeing the consequences of this top-down, heavy authoritarian governance style in Western countries all over the world.

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Look, I think to some extent now is an opportunity to have a conversation with Canadians and with people throughout the world about where the radical left and radical left-wing ideology has gotten us over the last couple of years. I am seeing a sense of optimism because I think the media is actually turning on Justin Trudeau. We certainly see a different conversation in the United States. And so I have a cause for optimism that we can get around this. But it’s important to note, as we talk about the environment, that I think what transpired over the last couple of years has actually resulted in opportunities for classical liberals, for traditional small-d democrats to have a conversation about issues that we couldn't speak about before.

Right? I think the left has overplayed its hand with COVID; they overplayed their hand. And so now I think Canadian Conservatives should feel a lot more comfortable to say things that we otherwise would not have dreamt of saying. For instance, we shouldn't be afraid—to say that taxing Sally ten dollars at the gas pump whenever she fills up is probably not going to affect climate change, right? It's probably not going to factor into global temperatures.

Canada produces less than 1.5% of all global emissions, and it's not clear that even if we were to cut all of them, it would make a material difference. And so instead, we're just punishing Canadians with our environmental policy. That is something that the Conservative Party had difficulty articulating over the last couple of elections. And also, Canada could be supplying cheap and reliable energy to the U.S. We could be doing the same for Europe; we could be doing the same for China.

We could have our cake on the energy front and eat it too. We could provide clean and carefully regulated fossil fuel energy supplies on a global scale. We could make ourselves much more prosperous than we already are by using our natural resources properly, and we could make advances on the environmental front. We know, for example, that the Americans that they cut their carbon output for those who are concerned about such things—and I don't happen to be one of them particularly—but they cut their carbon output substantially by turning to fracking and natural gas utilization, and no environmentalist preacher saw that coming.

I think Canada's natural resources are a blessing, and we should not blend, and I certainly will not let oil and gas be canceled. It's important not just for our strategic and national interests and our economic bottom line, because that's the only way we're going to get out of our economic hole, but it's also good for the planet because Canadians can produce and derive energy cleaner and safer than any other nation on earth.

And so I'm very interested—not just in oil and gas, but mining—we have an insatiable appetite around the world for precious metals and minerals. I'd like to look into natural gas as well. I think if you're concerned about the environment, then you would certainly be more interested in transporting oil and gas by pipeline instead of transporting oil by train, which is very, very risky.

As we come to think about this conversation, I think that we can solve almost everything that ails Canada right now with democracy and natural resources if we just—

Yeah, well, you know, it's definitely the case that the Conservatives on the environmental front could be taking the moral high ground back from the idiot environmentalists because these are problems that we can solve, and the pathway to solving them is actually laid forward quite clearly—not least by people like Bjorn Lomborg, who've produced an extremely detailed roadmap, I would say, of how to move forward in the face of the climate changes that we may perhaps be contributing to.

We're obviously going to be able to adapt to them, and they're nowhere near as cataclysmic as the doomsayers have prognosticated, constantly from Al Gore onward. So we can do this, and we could do it while ensuring that everyone had abundant resources, that the poor didn't have to freeze in the dark, which seems to be the leftist environmental approach to the problem. It's like who cares about today's poor when we have poor and 100 years to worry about? You know, that's a pretty sad bit of moralizing.

And obviously one—this war in Russia with Ukraine and with the West in general has certainly brought home one of the consequences of what foolish, environmentally predicated energy policy. That's another thing that Canada can play a role in ameliorating. We don't just can't do this; we must do this.

Yes, you know, half of Canadians—there are a lot of estimates, even before the most recent inflationary crisis, is that almost half of Canadians were $200 away from not being able to meet their monthly obligations.

And so now, with the price of gas effectively doubling and the price of everything and most notably food significantly increasing, many Canadian families are vulnerable, and we cannot continue to have this conversation over and over. We need to get serious and at least telegraph to the market that we're willing to start and we're determined to develop Canada's natural resources. That would immediately give people some relief.

And which is why I'm really worried also, Jordan, if I may very quickly, I'm nervous about what's happening in by way of our monetary policy. So much of this inflation is driven by food and energy that I'm not sure that aggressive tightening of our monetary policy is going to make the traditional difference that tightening would.

And instead, what we're doing is we're significantly increasing the cost of borrowing, which means we're increasing the cost of living on many Canadians. And yeah, that's exactly right. Well, there are actually food shortages, and they're going to get a lot worse, especially with the fertilizer crisis. And so this inflation isn't merely a consequence of runaway monetary policy.

Precisely, yeah. It is quite the situation. You know, you could have hardly hoped for a worse outcome to entice Canadians into over-investing on margin in real estate, and then cranking up the interest rates to cut them off at the knees, which is exactly what's happening at the moment.

It's important to appreciate that our housing industry accounts for about a third of our economy. And for many people, it's their life investment, right? Their principal residence can be their way to save for retirement. And the fact that we continue to try and undermine the market—even though we have to focus on affordability, for sure—but we also want to preserve value for people that work hard for it.

But beyond that, yes, the main cause, in my view, for what's transpiring is not just the printing—we printed half a trillion dollars with nothing in Canada, with nothing to show for. But beyond that, it's the lockdowns that are responsible for this runaway inflation. We essentially stopped the supply chain in its tracks a number of times; we reopened the economy, so there's obviously a spike in demand, and supply is simply not catching up to demand.

The market is out of the people. We can't get anything. You know, Penguin Random House informed me that they couldn't put out a double edition of my book in any reasonable amount of time—my two books—because they can't get cardboard or paper. That's Penguin Random House. A sheet of plywood in British Columbia is now a hundred dollars. You can't buy a vehicle for love nor money.

Most large-scale appliances and that sort of thing, especially those that depend on chips, are in unbelievably scarce supply, and one in five container ships right now across the world is locked in a port somewhere unable to move because of backups. Like, we have no idea how much damage we did to the supply chain, and we are by no means done with that catastrophe.

No, I like to joke—my Jeep started misfiring, and I gave it to the dealership, and they told me it's gonna take three weeks because there are no car parts. So there's no car parts, not because we printed so much money, but because we simply stopped the supply chain in its tracks.

But there's another reason for all of this, and I think that that's the tragedy of the labor market. That is the remarkable, unprecedented catastrophe in our labor market. Canadians have already suffered from low productivity before the pandemic, but what I'm seeing right now and speaking to many Canadians and small businesses and medium-sized businesses, businesses of all sizes, is that there's a remarkable shortage of labor.

And even though it appears as if we're back to almost full employment, we're just north of five percent unemployment, which seems good, but productivity has not come back. People are working less. Some continue to work remotely, so productivity is down. And you know, primarily what I'm noticing—and that's something that I talk about a lot—is that the labor force has suffered a post-trauma from COVID. A lot of Canadians and others around the world feel that something was materially lost in the last couple of years.

They're losing faith in institutions. They're estranged from their families. They're seeing the erosion of their democracy. Nothing's fun anymore. And so that, of course, translates itself into productivity. And until we restore productivity, we will not catch up on supply, and we will not be able to catch up with inflation. Demoralization.

Yeah, well, Canadians were 35% now behind the Americans in terms of comparative productivity, and the OECD has prognosticated that we'll be the worst performing industrial economy in the world for the next 40 years. It's a disaster. That's what Canadians are facing.

So that means, in all likelihood, we'll be half as wealthy as the Americans in 10 years. That's what it looks like now. When we could be wealthier, we could be wealthier and more prosperous than any nation on earth with reasonable policy. I'm not sure how we get out of this in the short term, but I know the following for fact: as soon as Canadians start feeling that this public health episode is behind us, when we feel that we no longer need government intervention, those that perceive risk should certainly are welcome to take mitigation steps.

But for many Canadians to continue to worry, “Are they going to lose their job if they don't take a booster?” “Are they going to have to work a minimum wage job again if they have to wear a mask for eight hours?” “Are they going to be told that they might not be able to go to school again next year?”—while government still remains in our faces, so to speak—the labor force has a difficulty recovering. We need to give people a relief by extricating government out of our lives as quickly as possible.

Yeah, well, God only knows what's going to happen when we face the next serious flu because the mortality rate for COVID wasn't that high. And as you pointed out, most of the people who died were very elderly, often already passed their stated life expectancy in the vast majority of cases, and also suffered from a number of comorbidities.

And so—and there's going to be a serious flu epidemic in the near future because we haven't had a serious flu for a number of years. And so it's an open question now what mortality rate will be deemed acceptable by the public health mavens and authoritarians who've now come to run the government and to provide us with the excuse to lock down yet again.

Like, what if the next flu is half as deadly as we thought COVID was going to be? Are we going to lock everyone down again? And if not, why not? Where's the line now that we've established the precedent following in the aftermath of the bloody CCP authoritarians? What? What?

It's no wonder that people feel that something has been lost because something was lost. So this is why it's so important that history reflects on what happened fairly. Right? I never sought to minimize the risk of COVID; it can be a very serious infection for certain folks, and it can regretfully be deadly for some.

But that doesn't mean that we don't need to be at the forefront about objective metrics. It doesn't mean that we don't need to factor in the collateral harm and potentially rethink our response. But beyond that, I think it's very important that history regards this episode fairly because Canadians, Americans, people all over the world in the free world have been subjected to unprecedented government tactics, right? The censorship, the segregation, the psychological manipulation.

And if that narrative somehow prevails and it suggests that it saved lives, then we will never fully get our democracy back, and we will never fully go back to normal. Those are two propositions that I find unacceptable. We have to get our democracy back; we have to go back to normal. And that will also help us deal with potentially the next public health crisis because we should have the courage to address it professionally and objectively.

So let's turn a bit now to the actual Conservative Party race. I just looked at some stats this morning about popularity polling within the Conservative Party itself. There were six candidates, although my understanding is that Patrick Brown has now withdrawn from the leadership race. So there are five remaining, if I have that right.

Pierre Poliev has clearly the lead, and Jean Charest is clearly in second place. I asked Charest's people, by the way, if he wanted to speak with me on this podcast. As I said, I've extended an opportunity to all of the leaders, and the response I received, as far as I can tell—although it wasn't exactly that clear—was that the Charest people decided I was too toxic to associate with the aftermath of the tweet I put out about a swimsuit model.

I guess they thought that was a scandal, which was quite surprising to me because it was a tempest in a teapot. But in any case, Poliev seems to have about 45% of the popular sport among those who are going to vote in the Conservative leadership race, and Charest about 14%. And then you and Leslie Lewis and Scott Haffson are bringing up the rear. What do you expect and hope to—what do you hope to accomplish by your leadership race, and what do you see as the future for the Conservative Party as the vote occurs and there's a new leader?

What—and how do you hope to play a role in that?

So, look, of course, we still see a path to winning, although I'm not under any illusion that we are not in first or second place. I will not comment on my friends and how they perceive or choose to conduct the race. I think it's important for the electorate itself to evaluate our respective positions and approach to the race because this is really an audition for the general election.

But what I think is important, that I've been blessed to contribute to the conversation—I’m glad that many of the Conservative candidates are coming around on this question of democracy. Initially, a lot of the media speculated that Roman is going to talk about COVID and lockdown, and that's behind us. Well, first of all, 20%—almost 20% of Canadians are still treated differently, so it's certainly not behind us.

But beyond that, now we're seeing all the other camps coming around to our democracy message, and so that is certainly something that I was very much hopeful for and grateful for that we get to push. Second of all, I think that insisting that our party is not afraid to stand for what it believes and that we speak with clarity is something that I've tried to do throughout my career. In the last couple of years, it’s something that I will demand from and expect from the leadership of this party, the future leadership of this party, as the voters expect it from us.

And that's the only way we're going to prevail with Canadians is when they believe what we say and when we speak clearly and we're not afraid to stand up for all Canadians—unlike in the last couple of years.

Is there— I think we should switch over to the other portion of this conversation. For those of you who are listening, I'm going to talk to Mr. Babber some more behind the Daily Wire Plus website. We're going to talk a little bit more personally, I would say. Is there anything else, Roman, that you would like to bring to the attention of Canadians?

You sort of summed up there by pointing out that you got pilloried pretty hard for speaking your mind, and the leadership convention and race offers you—or the leadership race offers you an opportunity to speak your mind again, show that that is possible, and to bring these attention—these issues to the attention of Canadians, which seems to me to be a very valid ambition.

Is there anything else that you'd like to say to people before we move to the second part of this conversation?

I don't see myself as a victim of the cancer culture mob. On the contrary, I saw what transpired as a remarkable blessing. I came to Canada when I was 15; we didn't have a cent to our name, and I've had every blessing this country had to offer. And I would encourage Canadians not to give up on Canada.

I've always felt that this is the best country in the world because all you need to do to succeed in Canada is work hard and be nice to people. And if you just do those two things, then everything will be okay. And we get to do that and still keep our religious and cultural values, and we get to be ourselves. And I have a sense of optimism, as I said to you in the beginning of this interview, that even the media is turning on Justin Trudeau.

With so many things that we're concerned about that—right now, we can solve them, as I said. We just need democracy and natural resources; that would alleviate a lot of the concern we have right now. As soon as government extricates itself out of our lives, we're gonna breathe a sigh of relief. We know what to do to solve this, and I'm incredibly grateful to so many Canadians coast to coast with whom my message of democracy has resonated.

I'm also thankful to all of my friends in this race. We have record membership of 675,000 members. It's something to the credit of all of them, and it's something to be proud of because that means we're bringing a large, motivated base into our next election. We have to emerge out of this united and firm. We cannot give up on our country, nor do we need to. We are a wonderful country, and I'm optimistic about the future.

Great. Well, that's a lovely place to end. And so thank you very much. I've been speaking today with Mr. Roman Babber, who is running for the leadership of the federal Conservative Party in Canada, hoping to lead that party and then to challenge the reprehensible, shall we say, Justin Trudeau for the position of Prime Minister of Canada in the next election, which can't come too soon in my humble estimation. Thank you very much for speaking with me today.

Thank you so much, Jordan.