Trudeau's Campaign Can't Fight This | Danielle Smith

It is very interesting to see while Ford has done the same thing in Ontario that Ford and Pev have really become the voice of the working class. I see the thing is you kind of see that with Trump in the US too. 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. So, to the degree that that's the case, I think the case for that is unassailable unless you're criminally, literally criminally blind.

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 Paul 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's a number of conservative Premiers who seem to be ideologically on board with your approach: there's Scott Mo, and Blaine Higgs, and so on. I don't know what your relationship is like with Doug Ford, and then we have Paulie, 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. See, 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 bloody 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.

We're going to see a lot of things that we don't know about the second Pierre Poilievre if he’s 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. I can see a scenario where he's in for four years, and all those Canadians who have to remortgage—which I believe is about 60% of them—are going to do that. They may lose their houses, and it's going to be like really a rough go for him. Then the Liberals are replacing him.

Now, 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 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 it—I talked to a young analyst who was looking and tracking at Justin Trudeau's declining popularity. He also was tracking the number of mortgage renewals that are happening each month, and it tracks perfectly. The more people who are having to renew their mortgage and 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 Poilievre, and so that’s very linked to what it is that they're experiencing. It's happening in real time, and happening very quickly, and it will probably accelerate.

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 out of the Liberals, the Green Party, and the Socialists, the New Democrats.

If I were 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: kids were told, “Well, graduate from high school, go to university, and get a bachelor’s degree. After that, get a master’s, and then a PhD, and 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, those kids who have gone down that pathway end up with one or $200,000 worth of student loan debt. Now they’re in their late 30s, trying to get out of the workforce, and their degree isn't as 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, but the home prices have escalated. 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. You start working right away, making $60,000; 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 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. 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 flourishing. 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, take care of families, take vacations, 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 they'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.

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. So, 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, 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 war 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.

God is portrayed in the Old Testament as something like the dynamic between conscience and calling. So 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’s 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.

So there’s this dynamic, and it’s an interesting dynamic because it maps onto the political domain almost perfectly. Conservatives are conscientious, and Liberals are open. Open people are creative and entrepreneurial; they invite, and conscientious people, they 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. Conservatives are very bad at propagating a vision to young people, and so that void is being 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,” 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. At minimum, that's the pleasures and responsibilities of the typical upwards driving, say, middle-class life that 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. And if you can add some additional adventure on top of that, so much the better.