Trump threw the election and then thereafter said that... Candidates, you've honestly become our 51st state. Which is never going to happen. Yeah, Polioff, lead out of his Majesty's Royal Opposition.
There's a fact in difficulty that you could be Canada's next leader, and we'll team said, I can ask you whatever I want. Okay, so it appears that the United States have made the decision to kind of go alone in the world. And that is a very big strategic mistake. In Canada's case, we have everything the United States needs if they treat us like a friend.
So for example, we have a fourth biggest supply of oil. And if you look at the leading five niche of these countries, you think the United States can most rely on. I'm looking at the third vial there in the road, Iran. Has Trump taken the right course of action?
The Iranian government has been extremely hostile and very dangerous to Canada. They are the leading world sponsor of terrorism. And there's no doubt in my mind that the only reason that they are enriching uranium is for the purpose of developing a weapon. And there's a far greater risk to them having a nuclear weapon than even North Korea.
So the initial actions were definitely necessary. But how do you think this plays out? And if Trump had called you and asked for your support, would you have given it? Well, let's put it this way.
What is the thing that you're most concerned about? We're overtaxing our population. We're punishing initiatives. We have 20,000 immigrant doctors who can't work in as wages have been destroyed.
Young people can't start a family in this economy. And that is why the working class across the Western world is so angry. The good news is we can reverse all of that. And the other thing that I actually was reaching to talk about is this.
I can see the emotion in your face. Yeah, it's still there. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that in a while. Guys, I've got a favourite to ask before this episode begins.
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I think you have a truly fascinating formative charted. One of which I've really seldom seen on this show, especially when the person rises so high in their political ambitions. But I think the most appropriate thing to start with, because it's just front of mind for me at the moment, is what the hell is going on in the world? And I mean, that's genuinely, I'm up all night trying to figure out if we're on the verge of World War III, what's going on with all these alliances we used to have, what is going on in the world?
The history starts really in the post-war period, with the massive increase in the power and the wealth of the United States. They unleash the capitalist system, they effectively buried the Soviet Union just by out hustling, out producing, and outgrowing until the Soviet Union collapsed. And then a new authoritarian power snuck up on the United States. China went from having 80% of its population living on one less than a dollar a day, to being the second biggest economy in the world.
At the same time, the American working class has been thoroughly screwed over by relentless money printing that has inflated their cost of living, while also inflating the wealth of a small group of elites. And I think this resulted in a major pushback. Now, some of that was justified, that pushback is justified, but I also think some of it is very much unjustified. Terrifying countries like Canada makes no sense.
If you're in the United States, you should want more friends, more trade with those friends. And that's one of the reasons why I've been touring the United States to make the case for Canada, and to remind our American friends that they are stronger working with countries like Canada and the United Kingdom, than they are pushing those natural allies away. It appears that the United States have made the decision to kind of go it alone in the world. I mean, I was at Davos and I saw what Trump said.
I saw a variety of things in the lead up to that, talking about taking Greenland, turning Canada into one of the United States' 51st states. Is that what he said, 51st state? That's never going to happen. It seems to be very adversarial, and through my childhood, and through my adulthood, over the last 30 years, the US has always been a strong ally, not an individualistic, isolated force in the world.
What's going on here? I think that is a very big strategic mistake. I think America would be better off working with the traditional Western Alliance that helped win the Cold War. We had a very big menace, a nuclear armed Soviet Union that was expansionary, its empire was pushing eastward into Europe, and the response of the United States was to build a strong NATO alliance, and then to unleash its economy to just outproduce the Soviets and bring them to their knees.
In Canada's case, we have everything the United States needs if they treat us like a friend. We have the fourth biggest supply of oil. You can see it here. That's right, we could pull that over here.
This is the oil reserves by country. As you can see, Canada is number four, and after us is Iraq and then the United States. But if you look at the leading five, which of these countries do you think the United States can most rely on? Is it Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Iraq?
No, it's Canada. It works very well with American refineries, and we sell it to the United States at enormous price discount. Furthermore, we could build up an enormous reserve of this oil so that if God forbid, the Strait of Hormuz were to be close, just a random example. You're from the American, America's friends in the neighboring Canada would have a couple hundred millions of barrels that are already produced and ready for use if it's needed.
So this is really kind of rocket fuel for the Canadian economy, but it's a strategically important for our American friends. We could cooperate better on this if we got a friendly posture and a fully tariff-free trade arrangement with the US. What's interesting when I look at these vials of oil that we have on the table, and I see that Venezuela is number one, Sirems number two, Iran, Canada, Iraq, and then the US is a lot of these countries that have a lot of oil are in conflict with the United States right now. That's right.
And now, as I look at this, it seems like I understand why. So Venezuela, I mean, Trump just flew in and took the leader of Venezuela and his wife out of bed and sees the country Iran, the US are all with Iran now. Iraq, I mean, that's a story already, and Canada has been the other one where it's been incredibly heavy over the last couple of months. Is this just all about oil?
Frankly, we don't really understand what the dispute with Canada is about, because we've been a very good and friendly partner to the United States ever since the early 1800s before we even formed as a confederation. What I would say to Americans, though, is you shouldn't have to worry about all of these countries. If you're working collaboratively with Canada and you're trading freely with a separate country to the north, then you will not be bound by what happens in these other less stable and arguably more hostile countries. What I believe we as Canadians need to do is use our natural resources as leverage to get what we want from this administration and future ones.
What we want is tariff-free trade for our steel, aluminum, lumber, and automobiles. And in exchange for that, we can produce more oil and sell more of it at better prices to the United States of America. Oil is only one part of it. There's also the strategic minerals that are necessary for, God forbid, modern warfare.
And we have those as well. We are a resource superpower, and I want to leverage that to get what we want from the U.S. and from other nations. I'm looking at the third vial there in the row, Iran.
Has Trump taken the right course of action in bombing Iran in the way that he has? And the other question that I think everyone's mind is like, how'd you get out of this? Is this going to end well? The Iranian government has been extremely hostile and very dangerous to Canada.
They killed 55 Canadian citizens and 30 permanent residents by shooting a civilian aircraft out of the sky, PS752, for reasons we still do not understand, and with no explanation whatsoever, they have unleashed agents into our communities and streets to harass the Jewish and Persian communities of Canada. And they are the leading world sponsor of terrorism. It is absolutely unacceptable for the Iranian government to ever acquire nuclear weapons. And there's no doubt in my mind that the only reason that they are enriching uranium is for martial purposes.
There's no need to enrich it to the degree they have in order just to have nuclear power plants. I have no doubt that they were doing it for the purpose of developing a weapon. And if that were to happen, it could be catastrophic for neighboring countries, but also for far away lands, if given the ability to develop a long-range missile. So my view and the view of the Canadian government is that the Iranian government cannot be allowed to develop nuclear weapons.
And any action to stop them from doing that is necessary for world peace. Was this actually necessary to stop that in your view? I think that the initial actions were definitely necessary, particularly the bombings four or five months ago to target the nuclear development sites. But I think any actions to degrade their nuclear capabilities, prevent them from ever achieving them, is favorable.
And I hope that it will weaken the regime enough for the people to overtake it and claim control of their country. It doesn't look like that's the case. I think they've appointed the son of the Ayatollah to lead the country now. And they seem to be firing it every day in the region.
There were some reports that they might have listed missiles that can reach Europe as well. Yes. And this is what we have to stop. I mean, the idea that they are carrying out this aggression simply because they've been attacked is false.
They would have eventually carried it. Other question is when and with what means. And if we had just sort of slept and waited, we would have ended up with a catastrophe. This is different than North Korea.
North Korea was allowed to get nuclear weapons, but they don't have the same celestial fundamentalist ideology there. Ultimately, the regime in North Korea is interested in its own survival and its power. The regime in Tehran has a theocratic dream if they believe that there's an afterlife in which they could be rewarded for carrying out mass destruction on what they call the infidels. They don't respond to deterrence the same way that Pyongyang and North Korea would.
There's a far greater risk to them having a nuclear weapon than even having that in a communist totalitarian state like North Korea. But for Canada, in this environment, our superpower is again our resources. And that's why it's been one of my major obsessions to unblock our resources, get them to tide water, accumulate them in a strategic reserve, that would allow us to really flex our energy muscles in environments like this, and also reduce dependence on regime like Iran, like Saudi Arabia, like Venezuela. If Trump had called you and asked for your support, had you been leading the government of Canada, would you have given the support?
This is the big conversation in the UK because K-Starmer was reluctant to send troops originally, and it seems to have asked Trump in an interesting way. So our Prime Minister did support the attack, and I agreed with Prime Minister Carney on that point. That is distinct from contributing Canadian soldiers, sailors, and aircrew. I'm not proposing that we send ground troops to Iran, and we are not in a position right now to supply a lot of the demands that this conflict would require.
It depends on what they ask for before we get an answer from Canada on what it is that we can provide. You're something that knows a lot about history. You seem to know a lot about a lot, frankly. And I don't know a lot about a lot.
So when you think through how this could go, it doesn't appear that the Iranians are going to roll over very easily. The other Iranian leadership are going to roll over very easily. Trump doesn't appear to be a man that likes taking hits to his ego. So it doesn't appear that he's just going to pull out and let things unravel.
And then the third option one would say is that they double down even further in central to the region. What how do you think this plays out based on everything that you know about with history, about Trump, and from your pattern recognition? Well, it could go a variety of ways. Remember the first Persian Gulf War, George Herbert Walker Bush, decided that he had downgraded and penalized Saddam Hussein enough for the invasion of Kuwait.
He declared victory, and he moved on. And ultimately, that left a lot of stability in the region. His son then went and pursued a full, out and out regime change. And that was a much longer enterprise.
The president will have to decide which of those two bushes he uses as a model. But I think that the important thing is to know what the objective is. For me, the objective has to be to make sure that the Iranian government never gets the capacity to send long-range nuclear missiles to countries, or even short and medium range to Israel for that matter. Beyond that, I think it's up to the Iranian people to take advantage of the weakness of the regime and rise up and reclaim their country.
I don't think this regime has popular support. I know a lot of Iranians who are blessed to have a lot of very secular, pro-Western Persians who live in Canada are probably Canadian, and they will tell you that there's almost no support for the regime among the people of Iran. They need to find a way to overturn the regime, and that would give a lot of comfort and peace to the rest of the world, but also give democracy to our deserving people. What would you do if you were Trump?
That's a good question. Like I said, I would focus on the core objective of making sure that there's not a nuclear armed Iran without getting involved in a permanent quagmire. So everything's been bombed now, full-dose been bombed. So is this the time to pull out then?
I think it all depends on the intelligence they have about the nuclear capacity. That is the hinge point. We cannot allow a nuclear-powered Iranian military. That is what they need to determine.
For me at the moment, it looks a little bit like it's a little bit loose for Trump, in an interesting way. And I think this is also reflecting the fact that nobody really has a perfect answer for what to do next, because it's all just trade-offs. That's right, it is. That's right, and that's what the great Thomas Sol said.
There's no solutions just trade-offs in life. And it's hitting the price of gas at a pump in a big way? Yes. The way that concerns you?
Well, it's funny you should ask, because it shouldn't have to concern Canadians. Our enormous supply of oil should actually insulate us from it. Normally, what used to happen in Canada is when the global price of oil rose, our dollar would rise with it, because people would be buying more of our oil, which meant they had to first buy our dollar. A more powerful Canadian dollar meant that we had more buying power for internationally priced commodities like oil and food.
So we used to be protected from international oil price increases, in a way that we're not anymore, because our sector is no longer as strong and as big as it was as a share of our economy. And so what I want to do is unleash oil production in Canada, clear the regulatory bureaucracy, the government gatekeepers, get rid of industrial carbon taxes, and have a stronger dollar that makes life more affordable, and much more geo-strategic power in the world. There's a quite significant probability that you could be Canada's next leader. And for you to achieve all those things you've described, you'll need to have a productive relationship with the United States.
Trump, if all follows the law, won't be able to be elected. So it'll probably be a different leader by the time that you were in power. Although I know that there could be a different confidence between that you could get into power earlier. Your relationship with Trump, good, bad and different.
I've never met him. I've never spoken to him. No, I don't have no. I've made the decision that we have one Prime Minister at a time.
And because we are negotiating a trade deal, it's more like a review of our existing deal. I don't want our side as Canadians to be divided, even though I obviously disagree with my Prime Minister on a whole range of policy issues. I don't want to undermine in any way the Canadian side of the bargaining table. I would only do that kind of conversation with a teamwork, with the current government.
But what I've said is that our approach vis-a-vis Trump should be to focus on what we can control. So why not focus on what we can do at home, unlock our resources, build up a strategic reserve of minerals that are important to our American friends, but also to our other allies. Clear the way to export more goods to overseas markets, build alliances with the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia to diversify and become more self-sufficient. You keep using this word, unlock.
Yes. Clear the way. Yes. What are you referring to when you say clear the way in unlock?
Removing bureaucratic obstacles. The resources we have are massively profitable for the private sector to mine, refine, store and ship as long as they can get the permits and the low enough taxes to do it. So we need to remove those obstacles so that it now becomes possible for private investment, not subsidised by government, no handouts for business, but private investment to unlock and unlock those resources. You're just saying that you don't want to get in the way of Mark Carney.
Well, I don't want to get in the way of negotiations with a foreign country. Obviously, my job is to be his opposition in the House of Commons on domestic issues, and even on international issues, but not to do so in a way that undermines the national interest. A lot of countries aren't like that. It was interesting because you're on Jeremy's show at Global audience.
Yes. So, you know, if you talk about him, you're talking about him all over the world. And you said you wouldn't criticise the leader of your position unless you were in Canada. But you know that, you know, you're reaching everything everywhere all the time.
No, that's true. That's true. But I just think it's a good principle to follow, particularly during a negotiation that's happening across the border in that country. Like, you know, I think it would be a little different if we were in normal times and there was no trade dispute or if we were in a country with which we have no particular contention for me to say something critical about the government's policy back home would not have any repercussions for the nation.
But particularly over the next several months, while these talks are hopefully going to go on, I want to get the best outcome for Canada and have to put my country above myself. Why are you better than the current leader of the Canadian government? What, what is it you offer that is better than what he has to offer? My mission is to make Canada the most affordable, freest and richest country in the world.
My upbringing, I grew up in very humble beginnings. I grew up surrounded by working class people. These are my folks. That's an old one.
But I've heard of you there and your parents and your sister brother? Your half-brother? Yes, so as my dad and my mother were school teachers. My brother is my half-brother because we came from the same biological mother but a different biological father's adopted into the same family, kind of a complicated story.
Your biological mother adopted you at 16 years old. Put us up for adoption at 16 years old. She was 16 and then about three years later, she had another little boy and he, Patrick, was then adopted by the same parents. And there were two teachers that adopted you and Patrick?
Yes, that's right. I still remember when we went to pick him up. It was, so we went to this phone call and said, there's a little boy that happens to be half-brothers with your, with Pierre. Would you like to adopt him too?
Absolutely. So we went over to this building and we walk into this room and there were all these rows of babies and we walked past them and then we said, they said that's him right there and that was when I met my brother. You know, we picked him up. That's why I thought that's where babies came from.
There was a store. You know, we went to a store and get your groceries. There's a store where you can go and get a baby. That's why I thought because that was my first experience with it.
And we brought him home. And we grew up in working class neighborhoods. When I was about three, four-ish, we lost everything. We got smashed by high interest rates.
My mother had saved up enough to buy two little rental properties. We lost those and our home and had to borrow from our grandfather to get a down payment. So we'd have a place to live. My dad was driving this old.
We'll be able to be falling apart. And our neighbors were working class folks. They were just, you know, electricians, well-workers, police officers. So that's those that people I grew up with.
And I was admiring those people, admiring what they were able to do. And believing that they were generally taken advantage of by government. Never listened to and definitely then kept on the outside of decision making. And my mission has been to bring back what I call the promise of Canada.
That anyone can achieve anything doesn't matter if you start off as an adopted kid raised by school teachers or an immigrant from Botswana who grows up really poor. If you work at it, you should be able to buy a house, launch a business, become a, you know, a famous global podcaster or maybe a curate disease. And that was what Canada was all about. And that is what I'm trying to reinstate.
What age did you get to meet your biological mother for the first time? 21, 22. My adopted mother was very gracious because I said, I won't meet my biological mother without the permission of my adopted mother. She did all the work of raising me, all the hardships, all of my, she put up with all of my rambunctiousness and teenagers and drove me to hockey practice and, you know, emptied her bank account to pay for our food and stuff.
So I did not want her to feel like she was going to be left behind or forgotten about or replaced. And I asked her, you know, would you be okay if I met her? And she said, yes, of course, because I want to always be here and I always want you to have a mother. And I thought that was a really incredible thing to do because it's so big part, it's such a big part of a mother's identity is that they are the mother of that child, but to have a love that's so much deeper than that personal identity or interest is something I always remember as one of the most gracious things I've ever seen.
I can see the emotion in your face as you say it. Yeah, it's still there. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that in a while. What beautiful people?
Yes, we're very blessed. And it's people like these that inspire me that keep me going in this crazy world of politics. So you get to meet your biological mother at 2122? Yeah, around that.
Yeah. What does one say? One of the questions one needs to ask, if any? I'm trying to remember.
We went on a bit of a road trip from Ottawa to Montreal and we just got to know each other. She had a lot of questions about how my life had been. And I had a lot of questions about our biological family, about her father, who was a really great man. I would go on to meet a great Irishman.
And the circumstances that led to my conception and birth. And I really came to understand her decision to put me up for adoption. And I've never been resentful for it at all. She was 16, she just lost her mother to a heart attack.
She didn't have a lot of means and she just made a selfless decision that we would have more opportunity if we were raised by someone else. Did you ever learn anything about your biological father? Yes. Yeah, he works at a concrete plant in British Columbia.
And so I went and met him. He's a great father with children that he subsequently had and raised. And so he's a very good man as well. And my adoptive father is a teacher and he gave me a lot of wonderful lessons.
And I think is responsible for my way with words. Marlene and Donald? That's right. So Marlene's your adopted mother, Donald's your adopted father.
They divorced when you're 12 years old. Yes, it would be around that time. It was in grade five. Very difficult time for parents to divorce.
Very difficult time. I remember that that period of life very, very clearly. Because I remember one day my parents coming to me and telling me that they didn't love each other anymore and that they were getting divorced. They didn't.
Okay. But I remember a bit which I think did enough damage for. But it was around that age. And I remember where I was stood in the house.
I remember what I was wearing when they said that to me because it's earth shattering. It is, actually. I just can't, I can't, I can't forget it. It was, it was traumatizing.
But we were, my dad told me, and he wanted to tell me alone. So we got into the car. He said he wanted to take me for a drive. And we drove to the local corner store.
And we parked in the car and he told me that there. But it is very traumatizing. But at the same time, they were very, very good parents. So I don't judge them for how they ended up part.
We were very blessed. You know, they gave me a great start in life. Even though they weren't together, they loved us very much and they gave us all they could. And Donald would eventually count as gay.
That's right. What would it seem like he was dealing with the conflict of feelings? Yes. For much of the time.
He had been raised in a very devoutly French Catholic household. And that's why we have a French name. And before he got married, he didn't get to go into the priesthood. And so he was a very devoutly Catholic person.
He genuinely loved my mother, but obviously he wasn't programmed that way. You know, he has a wonderful partner and we're friends with, very close with him and his partner Ross right now. Do you see how that's changed you as a man, as you've grown up, whether it's your perspective on what love and romance is or anything else? I think that if everything just been white picket fences and you know, you know, totally predictable and then I wouldn't be the kind of person I am today.
I think it's also, you know, it's like you, would you have been as successful as you are if you had had a very easy childhood? I doubt it. I bet all the hardships that you had and the twists and turns that took you from Botswana to the United Kingdom and then onward probably gave you some superpower. And so this I think gave me the chance to understand that you don't judge people.
You love them for who they are. My parents also taught me an important lesson that Shakespeare says to thy own self be true. My mother had when she was a small baby, she was in a car accident and her fingers were burned off and she had horrible scars, herbal burns on her hand at the time. And as I got to my adolescence, I said to my dad, did it ever bother you when you started dating her that she had this injury?
And he said, no, because it didn't bother her. She was totally at peace and she never hid it. It wasn't long after we met that I forgot it was even there. And the message that I took from that is be yourself.
Don't try to hide the scars are the trophies of survival. So those are some of the lessons that my mother and father taught me. And my dad was the same about who he was. He just lived his life unapologetically and openly and he never apologized for who he was.
And that has stayed with me. When you speak of Marlene, you speak up with her with a great fondness and expression in your face like, you know, I've sat here six hundred times. So you get to see who matters most of people in their lives just by looking at their face. And she's clearly on the podium.
Yeah, she's a very feisty little lady, very short and very, very forceful. She taught me a lot about being, you know, put pregnacious and fighting for what you want and what you need in life. And we argued a lot when I was a kid and I think that maybe forged some of my current political argumentation as well. My wife is as a big part of it as well.
She's a very strong feisty, intelligent lady. With an incredible upbringing as well. She's a refugee from Venezuela and came with really nothing. And so she has this sort of a giver-like skill set to get anything done, no matter how difficult the logistics.
So I've been very, very blessed with strong women around me. At a very young age, it appears that you took a liking to politics. I mean, you mentioned hockey first and Marlene taking you talking with her. And a couple of photos of you playing hockey, which I found to be quite interesting, but yes, but politics.
When did politics come into your psyche? I would have been kind of in my mid-teens. Well, I got into football, hurt my back in football. So I couldn't stay on the team.
My mother had always gone to these sort of local conservative meetings, sometimes just bringing baked goods or attending a volunteer meeting. And I said, well, why don't you bring me to one of those? Because I'm bored out of my skull. And she did.
This gives me meaning. This gives me purpose. I want to go and pursue this. So I started getting more and more involved.
I got an internship making almost no money and I'm dressing up in a U-suit and really threw myself fully into this mission. One of the books that I realized you'd read at that time from some research is this book, Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Yes. So this is really, this book has to be accompanied by its more famous sister book, which is The Wealth of Nations, which that's the book that most people know Adam Smith for.
They think of him as kind of the father of capitalism. Because in 1776, he wrote this book, which described what we now call the free market system. And this was a really revolutionary idea because up until then we basically had various forms of feudalism where a small group of lords and knights and aristocrats control all the land and the great masses do all the work. And so you called them serfs.
They would do all the heavy labor and then the lords of the manner would take all of the benefit. Along came the system of free enterprise that Adam Smith describes. Which is basically has a very simple premise, voluntary exchange of work for wages, product for payment and investment for interest. And that the economy, rather than being guided by the iron fist of the king or the state, is guided by the invisible hand of the free market.
And this had been thought that this was crazy. How could the economy just sort of run itself? And the answer is through price signals. If the price of something goes up, people just automatically start making more of it.
And if you need more workers to make that thing, well, you raise the wages. And all of a sudden what do you know the workers arrive. And this system is absolutely ingenious. Like it's why when you go into a coffee shop and you buy your coffee, you say thank you.
They don't say you're welcome. They say thank you. Because they have something worth more to them than they had before, the money. And you have something worth more to you than you had before.
And this voluntary exchange puts everyone on equal scale. Even if you're a massive corporation, you want to sell something to a 15 year old kid. You have to convince them it's worth more than the cost. So everybody has to be better off in exchange for it to occur.
And that was how free enterprise formed. And it has led to a spectacular increase in the quality of living and the economic growth. 200 bold increase in economic growth in the free enterprise era versus the feudal era. So a lot of people thought Adam Smith is only interested in a system where people are out serving themselves.
Their self-interest, that's what they took from the statement in The Wealth of Nations. That it is not from the benevolence of the brewer, the baker, or the butcher that we get our meal, but from his own self-interest. But that was only half the story. The other half was in this book called The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which he explains how self-interest overlaps with virtue.
So what he said is that we have something called fellow feeling, which is to say we feel for the other person. And we feel good when someone else does good. It's why we explain that people donate to charity or they leave the door open for a stranger or they might help an injured person on the street because they feel bad when they see someone else, their fellow suffering and they feel good when they see him succeeding. And that's why it's called sentiments because you feel these things.
I saw this in my own son. He for the first time he got a little toy and he gave it to his sisters, the first gift he'd ever given his life. And he was so happy, like he literally ran in a big circle around the foyer of our residents and just laughing and screaming. It just made him so happy, happier than she was to even receive it.
And this is the best of human nature that his interest, his happiness was served by seeing his sister better off. And this is really laid out in some detail in the theory of moral sentiments. And for me, it brings together all of human nature in one place. Now, he's not naive.
He does accept that there are bad dark angels in our nature. But he gives the only plausible explanation that I have seen about how you intersect self-interest with altruism. And how did that change your perspective and therefore your policies and your career? I have found that those who push a socialist ideology have a gross contradiction in their view of human nature.
They say that human beings are wretched, self-interested, greedy when they're in the private voluntary economy. But they're angels when they're in the governmental economy. And therefore, they argue that the government should just control everything because then we have all these angels that will decide for us, decide what we get to, where our money is spent, what we're supposed to believe, in the moderns' day, what kind of vehicles we drive, what we should think. But that is a huge contradiction.
If a man is not capable of deciding for himself, surely he's not capable of deciding for others. And I think the worst, the worst devices in human nature come out when there is too much power and concentrated in their hands, absolute power corrupts absolutely. So my ideology is that we should disperse power. That it should be a bottom-up system with as much freedom and agency as humanly possible.
That people should be free to choose for themselves. And that the purpose of the government is to do only those things people cannot do for themselves. I guess if there's, you know, socialists listening now, they might think, well, we tried this sort of capitalistic approach to the economy. And it's resulted in us being able to buy less food and vegetables for our money.
The price has gone up at the pumps. People are struggling. It seems that inequality has widened. And the working class seem to be struggling more now than ever before.
They can't buy homes anymore, like my parents and my grandparents could. So clearly we need socialism, they will argue. Because the current system has not worked. Well, what we have now is socialism for the very rich.
We have governments that are actively redistributing wealth from the working class to the very, very wealthy. And that is why we see record inequality. Government is actively intervening in the economy to forcefully redistribute wealth up the chain. Up the chain.
Absolutely. And there are countless examples of it. When they block home building with heavy regulations, they limit the supply of homes. Those who have mentions, therefore, are wit richer because their houses are worth more.
But young people, newcomers, working class people, can't actually get a home. That is a one example of state intervention. Well, we could do maybe do an illustration here. OK, so this is the total amount of land in Canada where homes could be built.
And actually, it's quite reflective, I think, of the much of the western world in the UK. And this is a penny. Yes. Do you understand this demonstration?
Yes, I think what you're trying to say is that this is about how much land we live on. Yes. So Canada is a great example of this. Because we have 10 times as much land per person as the second closest G7 country.
And yet, we have the fewest homes per capita to live in. And why is that? It's because that the vast majority of the cost that goes into building a new home is not land, labor, or lumber. It's government.
It's government taxes, fees, charges, bureaucracy, lobbyists, consultants. So if you think of this home here, in Canada, when you buy this house, more of the money for your purchase would go to bureaucrats in office buildings than to the carpenters, electricians, and plumbers who actually build the home. Why? How?
Because the bureaucracy has grown like any organism in nature, which seeks to survive and multiply. They give us the second slowest building permits of any country in the OECD. They charge enormous development taxes, which started out just to pay for plumbing and roads for the related housing, but now have grown into just a huge cash cow for local governments, because sales taxes still apply on most new homes. And all of that gets bunged up by government and means that we have extremely expensive housing.
In fact, we are the most expensive in the G7, even though it should be dirt cheap to own home in Canada, because we have the most dirt to build on. And my goal is to remove all of that bureaucracy, speed it, have the fastest permits in the world, and make it tax-free to build homes so that everyone can afford one. I was reading some stats that said, I might butcher this a little bit, but it said that Canada needs to build roughly 450,000 new homes every single year until 2035, just to restore affordability. That's right.
And we're building about 240,000 per year. So we need to roughly double our home building to do that. The good news is we have 100,000, well, it's not good news. We have 100,000 unemployed construction workers who would be happy to pick up a hammer and start building.
We have hundreds of billions of dollars of investment that's ready to do it. We have an abundance of land. What we need are fast permits and low taxes so that we can unlock that building. What is the case for slip hummets?
There isn't one. There is one. Zero. There is no benefit to having slow permits.
They do not protect the environment. They do not protect public safety. We used to build houses a lot faster, and they didn't fall down. After the Second World War, permits were almost instantaneous.
We had a massive buildup of homes so that our returning veterans could have a place to live. In many neighborhoods of Canada, those homes are still standing. They have not collapsed. There's no, I'm not saying we get rid of building codes.
They should all have to follow standards of environmental responsibility and be fire resistant and safe. But it shouldn't take seven years to approve a subdivision to do that. We know how the developers know how to build according to the rules. They just need quick permits and free to plan to do it.
You think now where they are, you'll be able to approve these permits within minutes. Look, with all the technology, housing should be so much cheaper than it was before. In fact, everything should be so much cheaper, but this is another area where government is redistributing wealth from the working class to the super-rich. It's the monetary inflation, where we're creating cash at a far faster rate than we're creating the stuff that cash buys.
We've in Canada increased the number of homes over the last 10 years by 13%, but we've increased the money supply by 100%. In other words, there is now the growth in the money supplies eight times faster than the growth in the housing supply, which means for the average person that it bids up the price. Now, you might say, well, if everybody's equally getting their share of that money, then who cares? But they're not.
There's something called the Catalan effect, which is that the first people to touch the money in a monetary expansion are those who are already wealthy and already connected to the financial system. So when government creates cash to find its deficits, it doesn't just dump the bills out of an airplane into a suburban neighborhood. It injects it into the banking system by buying government bonds at inflated prices. And those who trade in those bonds are the first to get the cash.
Those connected to the financial system are the first to borrow it. They get to deploy it before it loses its value. By the time it trickles down to the working class people, it's lost its value and their wages have been destroyed. And this has been happening on and off throughout all of human history, but it's been particularly bad in the last 55 years.
And that is why I think the working class across the Western world is so angry. Canada have consistently dropped down the happiness league table. Well, actually from 2015, we've gone from 5th to 25th. We went from 18th to 25th just in the last year.
So you were the fifth happiest country in the world and now you're 25th? That's right. And part of it is food. We have the worst food price inflation in the G7 today.
It's due to a lot of hidden taxes that are baked into food production. We have an industrial carbon tax that charges on farm equipment, fertilizer, and food producers. We have a new fuel tax that's just come in. Single use plastic is now banned, which makes it so that food goes bad about five days quicker.
So it sounds kind of very virtuous. We're not going to use plastic anymore, but it ultimately means food goes bad. And somebody pays for that. So I want to get rid of all of those taxes and fees and unnecessary regulations that do nothing for our health and safety so that we can have more affordable food.
But more broadly, we have to get rid of the monetary inflation that I described. As I said, we've doubled our money supply in Canada from 1.4 trillion to 2.8 trillion in 10 years. So it is not actually that these things cost more. It's that the money with which we buy them is worth less.
Because we're creating so much of it. And why are you doing that? To fund deficits. To pay for debts.
That's right. And that's why all government, it's not just Canada, by the way. It's across the Western world. They're creating cash to fund deficits.
And the deficits come from having a big government. Yes, it's too big. That's right. That's too involved.
That's right. And the result is that we're creating cash faster than we grow food, build homes, or produce energy. And my mission, Stephen, is to flip that. I want us to create more of what the cash buys by unblocking food production, energy production, and home building, so that we add those things faster than we add the cash to the system.
Right. And I saw this graph here, this chart, which is GDP per capita with international counterparts. On there, it has Canada, United States, OECD. And it shows it's quite stark.
It shows that Canada has basically plateaued in terms of GDP per capita. Well, for the average person, what is GDP per capita? What does that actually mean? It's your income, really.
It's the, ultimately, the GDP, the gross domestic product is the value of all the things that you produce. If you're producing more per person, over time, people will see their wages rise, their real wages rise. If you don't produce more per person, then your wages are flat. And so that is what we've effectively had in Canada over the last 10 years.
Why? Because we are not unlocking our resources, our biggest industry is oil and gas, and it's locked behind very aggressive anti-development laws and bureaucracies, because we're blocking home building, and because we're overtaxing our population, we're punishing initiative with high taxes. The good news is that we can reverse all of these things. If we have the most pro-development and the fastest permits in the world, if we cut taxes on work, investment, home building, and energy, then we can massively increase our output of the things that we need to have a good life, and the wages that people earn to buy it.
This seems to be a familiar story across some western nations. It is. What are those western nations? And what is the thing that they've all gone in wrong in common?
Well, I think that it's probably true in the UK and the European Union as well. Well, let's take Germany. They shut down their nuclear sector, and they tried to effectively drive oil and gas out of their country. The end result was extremely high energy costs.
And this was another intervention that took from working-class people and gave to the very rich. Those who were able to get the subsidies for windmills and solar panels got fabulously wealthy, all very powerful people. But the workers in the plants and the mines of rural Germany ended up losing their jobs and paying higher prices for electricity, all of which, by the way, has been reversed because now the Germans are back to burning coal. So it did absolutely nothing for the environment.
This is another example of government intervention totally screwing over the working class, a phenomenon across the western world. And this is the big lie. The big lie is that when government gets big, it gives people their fair share. What it does, in fact, is it gives the money and the resources to those who have the most political power.
Those people are all rich, and it pays for it by taking from the working class. So my mission in politics is to reverse that entire approach, have a small government with big people, a meritocracy that rewards work, and a free enterprise system that requires businesses compete for workers with higher wages and consumers with lower prices. I'm looking here at the GDP forecasts for various countries around the world. In the United States, GDP forecast looks like it's been pretty strong relative to others.
Canada looks like it's going down 20, 25 estimates, 1.7%, 26 estimates, 1.3. The United Kingdom, as well, seems to have been lagging both the United States and Canada. And Germany, as you said, in 2024, their GDP growth is only 0.2, which is hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of percentages lower than the United States, Canada, or even the UK. But clearly, there is a problem with GDP growth here for Canada, for the United Kingdom, relative to a country like the United States.
It looks like the United States is doing something right. If you look at GDP growth, it's the main measure. Look, there are some policies that we can learn from. It's not just the United States, though.
Look at Switzerland, for example. The Swiss are among the wealthiest in the world. They have the best money, the lowest inflation. They have almost no inflation in Switzerland, by the way.
They have very strong money. The Swiss frank is the best currency in the world, better than the Euro or the American dollar. What do they have? Free enterprise, small government.
The share of the economy consumed by government spending is significantly lower than anywhere else in the Western world outside of Asia. And so they do very well. How is it that the Singaporeans have become one of the wealthiest nations on Earth? They have no resources, literally nothing.
They have to import their water, for God's sakes. They took a swampy, mosquito-infested island, and three peoples who were struggling to survive in their homelands. And they came together and created the wealthiest country in the world outside of the Gulf States. Why?
They have free enterprise. They have low taxes. It's easy to start a business. You're rewarded for your hard work.
This is the kind of thing we could be doing. So looking at the numbers of Singapore, Singapore operates in a league of its own, outperforming both the UK, Canada, and the USA in terms of growth and per capita wealth. As a hub economy, it is currently riding the wave of the global AI boom, because they've enabled entrepreneurship. And it is more than from a GDP perspective.
Last year, more than double the United States' GDP growth. And it's left Canada in the United Kingdom, and even Switzerland in its tracks in that regard. Interesting. It's a spectacular achievement.
I mean, Li Guangyu, who founded the country and created this miracle, should be studied by every leader in the world. Because I don't think there's anyone who's been able to generate such a massive increase in the quality of life, and to do it with literally no resources whatsoever, except for geography. And they managed to exploit their geography, as you said, to be kind of modern-day Nabataians. They're a trading hub for all of Asia.
Every sort of economic policy or philosophies does have a trade-off. I mean, it's one thing you learn as a podcast, and it's just always trade-offs. And if you're not clear on what the trade-offs are, then they might surprise you. Right.
I mean, you can talk about socialism, we can talk about capitalism, whatever. All of them have trade-offs. What are the trade-offs of your economic strategy and philosophy? Well, the leadership has to have humility, because it has to let go of power and turn it back to the people.
And that is a very hard thing for politicians to do. I mean, no politician wants to have written on their gravestone. He stayed out of the way, left people alone, so that they could do great things without him. Although, I think it would be better off if more of them did.
But I should also say that there is a role for government. I'm not suggesting that there shouldn't be a basic social safety net that provides the things that people who are less advantaged would not be able to have for themselves. They make sure that everyone has health care, even if they can't afford to pay for it, that there's basic schooling and roads and infrastructure. But what happens is that once you get beyond providing those basics, and government starts to metastasize into, well, all kinds of other things that are not its core responsibility, each dollar spent has less and less return, and then it turns into a negative return, where the more they spend, the more damage they do.
And I think we're beyond that point on the curve. Because I'm thinking about how immigration ties into all of this, and to GDP growth. I think in Canada, from the research I was doing, there has been a decline in birth rates. So there's significantly less people getting married, there's significantly less people being born.
So how does one run their economy, when you're not having new children being born, without bringing in lots of immigrants to help support that economy? Well, first of all, I think we have to ask ourselves, why has the birth rate gone down? And I would argue that it's economic reasons. If you cannot afford a home, then you have no choice to raise children.
You know, we have this phenomenon in Canada, of 35-year-olds still living in their parents' basements. And how do you even get a date? I mean, how do you bring a date home? You know, it's a challenge.
If you're 35, and these are great, high-achieving people who've got jobs, but they just can't afford a place to live, or they're stuck in a small apartment, because that's all their paycheck will buy them in the way of rent. And so I think for those economic constraints, we have a lot of young people who otherwise would love to have children in their late 20s, early 30s, who simply have nowhere to raise them. Am I right in thinking that a lot of these Western economies have allowed a lot of people into their countries to make up for the willingness or desire or the availability of people to do the sort of low-wage jobs? Is this what's happened globally?
Because what do you think? Yes, I think, frankly, I think that a lot of multinational corporations have abused the immigration system in order to drive down wages. In Canada, for example, the government massively expanded the international student and temporary foreign worker programs, and that allowed corporations to pay artificially low wages to people who do not have the same mobility rights and opportunities, and that drove down wages displaced people from their jobs and ultimately ballooned housing costs. And so my position is that we need to cap numbers and ensure that the economy, the health care, and housing grows faster than the population at all times.
If you cap numbers, does that mean that these corporations, these entrepreneurs, these companies don't have enough people to fill the roles in their companies and therefore have to move somewhere else? What does it mean? We have unemployment. We have people without jobs, but some multinationals don't want to pay full wages.
So they think, well, just undercut the wage by bringing someone in from a very poor country who's willing to work for a lot less, and who has fewer rights because they can't leave the job to go to another employer. So it's kind of like Easy Street. And so my view is that when you've got unemployed people and you're trying to fill your workplace, pay higher wages, give people a better return on their work. You've got unemployment.
Are those people trained and skilled and willing to do the jobs that Canada needs them to do? Yes, absolutely. I mean, we have 100,000 unemployed construction workers. They could be building the homes that we need built.
We have young people coming out of high school without a job. We have a 30-year highs in unemployment among youth. They should be getting those jobs. And Starbucks says, well, they don't want to take them.
Well, maybe you're not paying enough. If you're not paying the right wage, then you're not going to get the right worker. But pay an equivalent wage, and you'll attract a worker who will do the job. Again, I'm trying to pay devil's advocate.
Okay, so Starbucks increases wages. Yes, which means that Starbucks then will increase the cost of a cup of coffee presumably. Well, unless they can find more efficient ways to run their systems. More competition in the system will allow the worker to gain more and the consumer to pay less.
And the entrepreneur in the middle has to find ways to save and operate more efficiently. That's the magic of the market, is that everybody has a vested interest in driving the most value for the lowest cost. One of the interesting ways lots of employers are finding ways to drive efficiencies is this new technological day act. Right.
And again, maybe some ironically here, and Froppaker, one of the world's leading AI companies, released a report two weeks ago, a further graph up on the screen. But it shows why job disruption will take place based on how people are currently using their tools. And one of the things they noticed is that there's been a increase by I think roughly 14% in youth unemployment because entry-level jobs are the ones often in white-clear industries that have been taken out first. Right.
And you hear these things and you go, oh, you know, that's some stats and whatever. And it's not necessarily tank the economy yet. But as an employer of hundreds and hundreds of people all over the world now, I have started to notice that the case for hiring certain groups of people is becoming much more tricky now because of these tools. And it doesn't make me sound great saying that.
It's not that we're not hiring hundreds of people. But there's this certain set, when I look at specifically entry-level grads, if they aren't really AI proficient, they are a lot less appealing in some roles than people, young grads that are extremely air proficient, and the problem is not many of them are. And just in a company like mine, if you're AI proficient, really irrespective of age, and you know how to build this thing called AI agents, it's kind of like you come with 50 team members of your own. Wow.
That's what it's like. So I've got a kid called Kaz here. You know, he's a young guy in his 20s, his 20s. He's built a team of agents that I work for him.
So hiring Kaz means I get Kaz and his team of agents because he's proficient in that technology. Most of the workforce hasn't been trained because of the education system. So I think about this. So it's becoming increasingly difficult to hire entry-level people, but actually all the way up the board unless you have deep expertise in a domain, which would mean that I can get Kaz to make you the agents.
So like I might see a phone for example, 50 years working in finance, et cetera, deep expertise. I just need her and then she can build out a team of AI agents to work with her. Back in the day, if you've got five years ago, I would have needed her and her to have a massive team of people. Right.
As I always say that there's a certain group in society, people have deep domain expertise and people that are technical that I think are in high demand than ever before. And everybody else, as AI continues to replace them through things like autonomous driving and robotics is around the corner, is I think there needs to be a real conversation about what happens to these people. Can I ask you a question? So throughout history, we've had these scares where new technological developments have threatened to replace and really have replaced certain human labor.
So you had like the during the Industrial Revolution, machines were replacing muscular power. And then you had the Luddites who came and tried to smash those machines to protect their jobs. In the end, they just got different jobs with higher pay because they could do more with these machines and they didn't have to walk behind a mule fast pushing a plow in the hot sun all day. They had a tractor that would pull the plow and so on and so forth.
But and then in the dot-com era, we were told again that people are going to lose their jobs to computers. In fact, they were made more productive by computers. Do you think this time is fundamentally different than those prior technological revolutions? I would say, first thing is nobody knows.
The second thing I'd say is yes. The reason I'd say yes is just the speed of disruption. So unlike the in the Industrial Revolution, where it takes some time for the new technologies to come adopted because the nature of what those technologies were, this technology is built on the internet, which has global distribution. So open core is an example of a technology that is very to simplify it for the audience.
It can do anything on my computer. So if I put a computer here on this table, I can text open core on WhatsApp and tell it to go on this podcast right now, look at the part of the conversation that was most replayed by the audience, clip it, add subtitles to it, tweet it, or send it to my selection. I can get it to you. I'll tell you something I did the other day.
I was in my house in Los Angeles and it was very, very hot because it's a heatwave at the moment. So I said to it, can you go and take a look at my house online, buy me an umbrella that I can put because I like to work outside. I actually voiced it this. And what it did is it went on Google Maps.
It looked all around my house from all around the outside because it knew where I lived for some bizarre reason. It knew that I, the charcoal umbrella at a certain size would suit that table out there. It went on Amazon and found the charcoal umbrella. It ordered it, it arrives at my house.
And it transacted? It transacted because it had my login details to transact on this particular site. So but it's just the framing is it can do anything that you would do on a computer. A lot of people work on computers.
And the speed of adoption that we're seeing is staggering. So my concern is actually the sort of near-time displacement before we figure out the types of jobs that, the types of new jobs and then with robotics on the way. You know, you hear someone like Elon Musk saying that there'll be more humanly robots than humans. You know, and people say, well, you know, he's saying that because he's got vested interest.
Right. However, what I'd say is his timeline has sometimes not been right. But when he said he was going to make those spaceships land on chopsticks, the spaceships eventually are incredible. No, he's a brilliant mind.
I'm not an underestimate. Oh, my car, they drive itself without intervention. So I don't know. It's really interesting time.
I can both see why this technology is going to change the world for the better. And I believe it will. But then I'm just really concerned about certain economies and countries that aren't taking it seriously because they're so distracted by other things. Like a lot of them race dating.
A lot of them like integration seems to be the winning leader. Like to say the Brown people are the problem. But I'm like, maybe the alien is something else. Maybe the alien is these agents that are actually going to take our jobs.
I believe the basic human need is meaning to have the purpose in life. And often the question we have to ask is how can we guide this revolution in technology so that it empowers people to do things that continue to give them meaning. It was John Adams who said something to the effect of my father studied warfare so that I would have the security to study commerce. I study commerce so that my children will have the prosperity to study arts.
If these new systems give us the ability to focus on the things that we love doing that give us meaning in our lives, and that could be a different thing for each person. While at the same time supplying with us with a lot of our material needs, it could be very positive. If it simply strips away our own utility and leaves lots of people without the ability to work at all, then it could be very, very dangerous to our lives. So I think that we have the public policy objective is to ensure that it becomes an enabler of humanity, not a replacement for it.